Closed doors...

My TV is dying. It's had a good life. I bought it at a Wal-Mart in Iowa in 1991 for a whopping $327. The great feature of the set was it had a remote! whoo hoo! (remember when that was a big deal!) It's been in 6 or 7 different apartments/homes and has given me hours of entertainment... but now it's too bright - as in no darks or contrasts - all the time. (hmm.. there's a spiritual parallel in there somewhere...)

So I decided I was going to buy a new one. tonite. Went to 3 stores and at 2 of the stores (Circuit City and Sears) no one would help me (and at one store I even requested help and still no one came), and at the 3rd store (Best Buy) my sister had to actually raise her hand and ask for help!! What is it about guys who work in those techie places? It's like it pains them to help out a woman, unless she looks like Jessica Simpson... anyway, I digress..

My friend Laura has all these crazy ideas (one of which took us from a normal Saturday lunch directly to the airport and ended up with us spending that night in Providence, Rhode Island without ANY luggage and trying to return home in time for a Sunday luncheon I was hosting at noon!!!), and one of the ways she can tell if it's her idea or God's leading is to "test" it. On the previously mentioned Providence trip we made up a few parameters - the flight had to be leaving within an hour, had to be less than 2 hours in length, and had to get us back into Philly by 10am the next morning. If any of those parameters hadn't been met we'd chalk it up to a crazy idea and be done with it.. The idea behind this is that if God is leading our way, He wants us to try to open doors, but not knock them down. This also tests our hearts - can we walk away from something... so I was thinking a bit about this as I was going from store to store tonite.. was I hitting closed door after closed door because tonite wasn't the night to buy a new TV, or had I just not hit the right door yet? Once most of the stores had closed and part of me was thinking "hey, isn't Target open til 10?" I realized I didn't want to walk away from this idea.. meaning I was trying to get MY way.. not His.. or at least not now.. sigh.. so I don't have a new TV...

But I know Him well enough to know that when I do get a new TV it will end up being better than the one I would have purchased tonite. Honest. Believe me, I have many visual aids of the "wrong" and "I gotta have it my way NOW" things.

Maybe the TV He has picked out for me comes with a fabulous guy who can share the remote! or who at least delivers and sets it up nicely!