Bethlehem, through your small door
Came the One we’ve waited for
The world was changed forevermore
When love was born.
                   Mark Schultz, “When Love Was Born”

During college, I worked at McDonalds and just missed the super-size-it promotion, which burst upon the scene months later with thousand calorie fries, drinks large enough to hydrate entire villages, and sandwiches that clogged your arteries if you merely looked at them. The McDonalds Corporation was simply capitalizing on prevailing ideas: large is good; large says you’re worth it; large means success; large is always better.

And in keeping with these prevailing notions, the entrances to all the biggest places are often substantial ones, super-sized doors framed in neon and over which signs beckon come in, come in, come in with incandescent glory. For such doors should be as grand as the places and experiences that lie behind them. Shouldn’t they?

How often I’ve wished that God would create super-sized doors for me, clearly marking the passage ways into experiences and relationships I was destined to have. Oh, that He would send a million watts of light to blaze through the murky midst of my doubt and eliminate any error of choosing the wrong door! It only seems fitting that God would make large, conspicuous doors for his wayward, short-sighted sons and daughters.

In Mark Schultz’s “When Love Was Born,” however, he writes that Bethlehem was a “small door” through which the “world was changed forevermore.”The stable in which Christ was born offered no breadth, no width, no neon splendor. Just a small and ordinary doorway into the most extraordinary event the world has known. Super-sized love in a tiny package.

About small doors, I think Shultz has it right. Their size and appearance give little to no indication of the riches that lie beyond. Bethlehem is, perhaps, history’s greatest paradox.

In his Reflections of the Psalms, Christian theologian and writer C.S. Lewis writes: “For the entrance is low: we must stoop till we are no taller than children to get in.” Perhaps this is point. Too often, we search for grand doors that we might enter with bluster and bravado, tossing our coats and hats confidently aside. When instead, we should kneel so that we might see and pass through even the smallest doors, so that we might enter with a child’s wonder and humility.

For the past year, my mother has asked if I might write about my father’s death, that is, the experiences we shared in the days that preceded his death. And I have been reluctant. Not because I don’t revere those experiences or find them worthy of written record but because I found myself unworthy of recording them. And yet in the days before we celebrate Christmas, before we enter that still, small door of Bethlehem once again, I have been thinking about my father.

I once believed that death might offer sizeable portals, monumental corridors through which individuals would shed their aged or diseased bodies, like well-worn coats, for eternal ones. These would be doors of real stature and beauty. Doors with electronic eyes that opened graciously at the last breath. Custom doors whose artistry reflected each unique life and soul. And perhaps, in the days before my father died, I was waiting and watching for such a door through which his remarkable life would pass. For my father seemed so much larger than life, and it seemed altogether right that death’s door be commensurately grand.

How wrong I was. For days, friends, colleagues, students, and family members came to offer what words they had to express their gratitude for the presence my father had been in their lives and for the legacy he would leave behind. With each visit, a small and intimate door opened into the communion of their souls.  These intimate openings would foreshadow another—I like to think a simple door with planks hewn from local cottonwoods—through which my father would quietly enter one night as we slept.

All along, I believe that my father understood how he would enter his death quietly and humbly as a child. Like Lewis, he knew that stooping was required. As I sat by his beside one night when my mother and sister were sleeping, he told me of a vision he had when he was a teen. In this vision, Christ was standing before a group of laborers in a field that had recently been harvested. My father told me that Christ’s arms were open as he beckoned the dirty and worn workers, saying, “Come to me.” This was the humble image he had held in his heart for seventy some years: walking into Christ’s arms with no adornment or fanfare but the final beating of his servant heart.

I had it wrong, you see. It was never the door that was intended to be grand and glorious but rather the life passing through it. Jesus entered the world inauspiciously in a small stable and left it flanked by common criminals. Neither his entrance nor his exit would define his immeasurable impact on the world.

And it would not be my father’s entrance nor exit from this life that would reflect the magnitude of the love, the wisdom, and the life he had shared. Did I feel his small door opening that night as lay in my bed trying to sleep? Did I hear God’s still, small voice urging me to rise and go to him? Did I know, without seeing, that my father’s door had closed?

In the center of our living room, I stood alone at the head of my father’s hospital bed and took his hand one final time. There was no one to see or to mark the time of his passing, but I felt my universe shift as I looked out into the black August night.

I’ve learned much about small doors. So, when my time comes, I’d like to think that I will rely on muscle memory as I bend and duck to clear the transom. I’d like to think that years of stooping will prepare me for this final door. And like a child, I’d like to think that I will pass through it expectantly into the open arms of my Father.

I am the door. If any one enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.  John 10:9 ESV