“Close that door”, my Mom and Dad would say, followed by “We are not trying to heat up the outside”, if we held the door open to long in the cold month of the year. My father would then explain, “every time the cold air comes into the house it lowers the temperature of the house, causing the thermostat to kick on and start the furnace to warm the house again. Each time the furnace starts it causes the gas meter to go faster, costing us more to heat the house.” I can remember as a child helping my father caulk all the windows in the house to make sure that air was not seeping in from undiscovered places. He would say, “place your hand under the window seal, see how much air is coming through that small opening.” Months later showed us the gas bills indicating a significant reduction in the expense. Years later, they replaced the windows in the house with the thermo-sealed windows which kept the house even warmer and reduced the expense even more.
Well, if you have been reading my blogs up to this point, you can probably already see that some analogy to life is about to follow. Indeed, you are correct! Sometimes you can be fired-up with a dream or a vision and a long as you keep them in a warm place, your momentum grows. But sometimes in our excitement we stand in the doorway too long and the cold air then cools the dream. Or others, peering through your windows, begin to blow cold air through every crack they can find. Before long, the dream becomes to burdensome and emotionally expensive to carry. You pack the dream away, hoping to take it out in warmer months, but the warmer months come with their own labor, and cold dreams can be packed away forever.
We must discipline ourselves to close the doors and seal the windows to keep the warmth in and the cold out when fire is needed to fuel our dreams. Doorways are passages, not meant for standing. We must seal the holes, so the cold doesn’t seep in so fast in the winter, and the cool air doesn’t seep out so fast in the summer.