Open the Door. Literally.

It is 5:34 in the morning, and I am opening my front door to welcome a 17-year-old from Costa Rica. She’s seen her parents and brother off at the airport to return home, but she is staying. She will be living with us for almost three months.

We first met her when she was a sweet seven-year-old who spoke better English than I will ever speak Spanish. Over the course of ten years, we’ve grown to love her family and the prison ministry work they do in Costa Rica. On our trip to Costa Rica last summer to visit, she mentioned she was interested in studying psychology, and I told her she was welcome to come stay with us and see some of our work at HPC before starting college in the Fall.

When I share with others our plans to have her live with us, I typically get one of two very different responses. One: “That’s great!” or Two: “Why would you do that?” The gut response most likely speaks to the person’s level of openness to experience or some other personality trait. And I appreciate the candidness.

And if I’m honest, I feel both of these responses all at once as I literally open the door to my home-This is going to be great! Right along with, What the heck are we doing? All before the sun even comes up.

I think she feels the same things too. All at once.

And I think such is the way of opening the door to anything worth doing. Worth learning from. Opening the door takes effort. There will be good and bad. Mistakes and joys. Excitement and exhaustion. All at once.

As we chose “Open the Door” as our 2024 theme at Horizon Point, we were trying to point to just this. The duality of so many things. Each one of us will spend the next month writing a blog about what this theme means personally. But I think we all agree opening the door is the way to let light in. And we are all about some light at HPC. It is who we are and who we strive to be.

So today for me, opening the door literally means opening the door. No metaphor, no hypothetical gesture. Plan action.

And what a pretty morning it was, as the sky opened to light a few minutes after the door was opened.