Her gaze flicked to the prayer-covered door in the other room. “I realized I was helping people polish the outside of their lives while ignoring what was falling apart on the inside. I started to feel like I was building facades instead of meaning and truth.”
Luke’s pen hovered over his questions. “So how do doors fit into all this?”
A soft breath left her, almost like a laugh. “They started as a metaphor I couldn’t escape. My life felt like it was falling apart, even though it looked perfect on the outside. But nothing was perfect. I started taking walks after work so I could sort my thoughts. While I did, I kept noticing doors everywhere—boarded up, freshly painted, cracked, abandoned. And I started thinking about how many times doors had closed on me. Jobs. Relationships. Dreams I thought God had promised but didn’t happen the way I expected.”
“Keep going.”
“As I was thinking about that, a Bible verse came to mind. Matthew 7:7–8, which says,‘Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.’”
“Fitting.”
“It is. Those verses are a message about the assurance that God will respond to prayers that are made with faith and persistence. I’d forgotten that for a long time.” Her voice trembled slightly. “I used to think that walking through one wrong door meant everything was ruined. That if I trusted the wrong person or chose the wrong path, God’s plan for my life would disappear. But I’m learning He doesn’t work like that. Even when we choose badly—even when people aren’t who they say they are—He still finds ways to lead us to something honest.”
Luke looked up at her fully now, waiting for her to continue.
“One evening, I stopped in front of this old, abandoned church that had two red doors at the front. The doors were chipped and unremarkable—but I felt this strange pull, like I was supposed to pay attention. While I stood there trying to understand why that door might matter, the pastor who used towork there walked by. I apologized for staring, of course.” A faint smile touched her lips. “But I asked a few questions. About the church. The door. Why that color.”
“And?”
“He told me a woman at the church insisted on painting it. She was a two-time cancer survivor who’d become one of his top volunteers. She told the pastor that the door reminded her of every prayer God had answered and every one He hadn’t—and how both had shaped her life.”
Luke took a sip of his hot chocolate as she continued.
“That conversation stayed with me. I went home and made a video that I posted on social media. I didn’t plan for it to become anything.”
“And it went viral,” Luke finished.
“A hundred thousand views in the first day.” Amayah still sounded faintly amazed by the number. “People started sharing their own door stories. Their closed doors. Their open ones. The way God had redirected them.”
“I didn’t realize there were so many door stories out there.”
She let out a soft chuckle. “Neither did I. But I wanted to tell all those stories. Soon the sponsorship offers started coming in. Monetization. Partnerships. I never chased those things, but they do help me continue doing what I love. So I keep telling the stories.”
He shifted in his seat. “Were you still applying for other jobs when all this happened?”
“For months. I didn’t trust my success at first. I thought the attention and popularity of it all was temporary—a distraction from real responsibility.” Her eyes lifted to meet his. “But eventually I realized what was happening.”
He waited.
“A door had opened,” she said simply. “And I walked through it.”
Silence settled over the room, heavy in a way that felt reverent instead of awkward.
Luke glanced again at the door with the prayers. At the doorknobs. At the woman who spoke about redirection like it was holy ground rather than loss.
He opened his mouth to respond when?—
Crash!
Amayah jolted upright, the cocoa in her hands sloshing dangerously close to the rim. “What was that?”
She set down the mug, and they rushed into the living room in time to see fractured glass spiderwebbing across the lower pane of the front window.
Luke peered through the broken glass, pulse ticking faster.
Then his gaze dropped to the area rug in front of her couch.
An object lay on the floor that hadn’t been there before.
