SHUT THAT DOOR!
Story★★★★I WAS TAKING a train back to Boston from Grand Central Station in New York and I wanted Mrs. Stidger to meet me when I got to Boston, so I decided to call her up from Grand Central.
That busy station was a bedlam of noise and confusion. The waiting room was literally jammed with travelers and friends to meet them and see them off—civilians, soldiers, sailors. They were shouting and milling about, and when I got Mrs.
Stidger I could hardly hear her voice, although ordinarily the telephone connection between Bos- ton and New York is as clear as if you were talking from room to room in your own home. “T can’t hear a word you say!” I said to her peevishly, as though the confusion were her fault. “Speak clearly!”
“Speak clearly nothing! It’s not my fault. Use your feeble brain and shut that telephone-booth door, and you can hear me. Even up here I can hear the noise of that station.
Close the booth door and shut out the noise, and you can hear!” I chuckled to myself, for it was so hot in the stuffy booth that I had hated to shut the door when I called her up.
She was exactly right: the confusion was coming from the Grand Central Station. I closed the door and at once the line was as clear as a bell. We had our unobstructed conversation and all was well. That simple, everyday experience taught me a great lesson which I shall not soon forget, that is, that we all of us have to learn to close a good many doors of life to shut out the noise and con- fusion if we expect to get a clear message—from the outer or the inner world.
“Close the door and shut out that noise, and you can hear!” Most of us have to live in a world of noise and confusion. I know a woman who for years recorded and balanced an intricate set of books next door to a boiler factory without ever making a mistake. I went to see her in her office once and my ears were deafened.
I asked her how she kept her mind on her complicated bookkeeping, and she said, “Oh, I just shut out all of that noise and never hear it.” I know a woman who has a houseful of children all the time, yet she is the calmest person I know. I asked her how she did it—for her home was a bedlam at certain parts of the day, with yelling, battling, playing, romping children. Her answer was, “I have trained myself to close the doors of my mind and shut out the noise.
You know, you GAN train yourself to shut the spiritual doors of life.” The busiest man I happen to know in New York has his office on the second floor of a building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The clang, noise, and confusion of the busiest intersection in this nation comes thundering up into his room, and yet he is as cool, collected, and calm a man as I have ever known. I asked him why, and he said to me, “I shut all of that out with a slam of my mental doors.”
In this busy, clamorous American life which we are forced to live we have to learn the lesson that Jesus taught (Matt. 6:6): We must learn to go into our spiritual closet and “shut the door.” = & &
The point
A noisy phone call teaches the author that shutting out life's noise and confusion, as Jesus taught in going into one's closet and shutting the door, is necessary to hear clearly in daily life and prayer.