Acts 16
The Detour That Was the Direction
"And we concluded that God had called us to preach the gospel to them." (Acts 16:10)
Paul had plans. He tried to go into the province of Asia. The Spirit stopped him. He tried to go into Bithynia. The Spirit wouldn’t let him. So he ended up in Troas, where he had a vision of a man from Macedonia saying: come over and help us.
They left immediately.
What looks like a series of closed doors is actually God redirecting them to Europe. To Philippi. To Lydia, the first European convert. To a prison, a jailer, and an earthquake. To a church that Paul would love deeply for the rest of his life.
The closed doors weren’t failures. They were steering. And Paul recognized them as such and kept moving until the direction became clear.
In my life, I’ve pushed against closed doors long after I should have stopped pushing. And seasons where a closed door I was frustrated about turned out to be the thing that sent me somewhere better. The difference between those two experiences was usually whether I was moving from peace or from pressure.
