A frigid wind scoured Chicago, but the toddler was burning with a fever. Her parents hovered by her crib and prayed for the storm to blow over. The storm threatening them was not some force outside their damp apartment; it was the spinal meningitis within the body of their precious daughter.
That storm did blow over. God spared Betty’s life, but the fever stole her hearing. It was crushing to Bill and Cathy to realize that their daughter would never hear again. But where they saw a wall, God had placed a door.
Your life consists of opportunities and opposition. The way you see these two dynamics will determine where you will go from here. In I Corinthians 16:9, after describing his plans, Paul says, “For a great door and effectual is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries.”
What can we learn from this verse about opportunity and opposition?
1. Opportunity and opposition don’t cancel out one another; opportunities do! Paul spoke of an open door and open opposition in the same breath. A prime opportunity doesn’t exclude big problems. But you will often have to say no to one opportunity in order to say yes to another. The discipline to say no gives us the power to say yes.
2. Opportunity and opposition are usually found together. Two shoe salesman are trying to make a living on an island. One salesman says, “No one wears shoes here! I give up.” The other says, “I’ve hit the jackpot! I’m on an island full of people who need shoes!” Both men are looking at the same island, but one man sees the opportunity while the other sees the obstacles.
3. Expect both opportunity and opposition, but go looking for the opportunity. The opposition will find you! Sir Francis Bacon is supposed to have said, “A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.” So we find opportunity as the result of making an effort.
Ultimately, you will find the kind of opportunities you are looking for! Opportunity is often disguised as a problem, but even in these situations, we tend to see what is most important to us.
In Colossians 4:3-4, Paul asked believers to pray for him, that “God would open unto us a door of utterance to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds: that I may make it manifest as I ought to speak.” Paul essentially says, “Pray that I will have an open door to preach the Gospel here in prison. (Of course, that is why I am in prison in the first place!)”
Paul did not pray for a door of opportunity in this hostile environment other than the one he had always sought. And he did not pray for an open prison door, though that would not have necessarily been wrong.
Did God answer that prayer for an open door to give the Gospel in prison? Listen to his words at the end of his epistle to the Philippians: “All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar’s household.”
You mean there were believers on the inside of the Roman machine? Apparently so! Here were, perhaps, Roman guards, of Caesar’s household but in God’s family. How could this be? Paul saw an opportunity where most would have seen a wall.
At a pivotal point in their lives, those heart-broken parents of the little deaf girl went from seeing their circumstance as an obstacle slowing their progress to recognizing it as the door to the path of God’s choosing. God used this event to spur Bill and Cathy Rice to action. Because of the open door it created, thousands of deaf people have come to Christ.
Today, the Bill Rice Ranch is a reminder that sometimes our golden opportunity begins life looking an awful lot like a problem.