How To Keep Going When The Doors Keep Closing

Have you ever been in a season where nothing seems to go your way? You get excited for this opportunity or that possibility, but then things don’t work out how you wanted them to. One door closes, and then another, and then another. You keep trying to make something happen, but with no luck. And eventually you get to the point where you’re afraid to walk up to another door because you don’t want to be disappointed if it closes too. 

I get it. Shattered dreams, unfulfilled expectations, failures, they’re all disheartening. And when they come in multitudes, it’s that much more difficult to keep going. I don’t know about you, but I can only get knocked down so many times before I’m ready to just sit on the ground for a little while. 

I’ve recently been in the thick of a “closing door” season. For the past several months, I have been searching for a new job. I’ve come across several different opportunities and pursued many of them. I sent out resumes. I took personality assessments. I spent hours prepping for interviews, and then went through a bunch of those interviews. But for the longest time, the answer was always the same. 

No. 

Now to be fair, it’s been said a lot nicer than that. But all of the answers could be summed up in that two letter word. And if I can be honest, it was discouraging. Hearing one “no” on its own is bad enough. But when you hear one “no” after the other over the course of a few months, you start to feel like you’re taking a beating. There’s a heaviness that weighs on your heart, and it’s a heaviness that isn’t easy to get rid of. 

A few weeks back, I went through a period where I really felt the weight of all those closed doors. But on one particular evening, I saw something that reminded me of another time in my life when I was facing a season of disappointment and failure. 

I was at my parents’ house for the weekend to celebrate my birthday, and at one point on Friday night, my mom pulled out a box filled with old pictures of me and my siblings when we were little. We started flipping through them, laughing at our retro outfits and unfortunate haircuts. Then I came across a picture of me when I was about four or five years old playing softball with my dad. 

My parents put me on my first softball team when I turned four. And because my dad was such a great parent, he would take me outside to the backyard almost every day and help my practice. He would throw me grounders and I would have to scoop them up and throw them back to him. But when I was first starting out, a lot of times I would miss the ball. Or I would drop it when I tried to pick it up with my glove. I would get so frustrated whenever I messed up that I would start to cry. And then I would say four words that I’m sure my dad heard way too many times to even count. 

“I can’t do it.”

After so many times of trying and failing, I would just want to give up, thinking that because I kept messing up that I was never going to get it right. Thankfully, my dad wouldn’t let me quit. Anytime I would say those four famous words, he would say, “Yes you can. Now let’s try again.” And he would throw me another grounder. 

This is such a beautiful picture of how God is with us. So often after we’ve faced several failures or disappointments, we want to stop trying. We lose all sense of perseverance. We say, “I can’t do it.” But then there’s God, right there beside us, saying, “Yes you can. Now let’s try again.”

It is so important that we continue to persevere even when the doors keep closing. Paul talks about this in Romans 5 when he says, “…but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame…” (Romans 5:3-5, ESV).

The only way we’re going to learn how to persevere is to face difficult circumstances. But we can be confident that as we are enduring those circumstances, we are building character, and that character produces hope. And hope is the best thing you can have when you’re dealing with failure, disappointment, and closed doors. 

Hope is a gift from God, a gift that we often tend to ignore whenever life gets tough. We want to focus on how bad our current situation is, or how nothing seems to be going our way, or how we’re tired of being hurt and rejected. We only feel hopeful when things are going well and life is smooth sailing. But we can’t let our circumstances dictate how hopeful (or hopeless) we feel. Our hope is based in our Heavenly Father. Nothing more. Nothing less. And if we can live our lives with that mentality, we can persevere through however many doors get slammed in our faces. 

Maybe you’re in one of those seasons right now too, where your circumstances are less than ideal. Maybe you’re facing one failed relationship after the other. Or you might keep getting rejection letters from the grad schools you’ve applied to. Or maybe you’re like I was and doors seem to keep closing on your career. Regardless of what you’re facing, please hear me when I say this. Don’t give up. Don’t think you can’t do it. Because you can. 

You CAN keep going. 

You CAN persevere. 

You CAN get back up. 

And you can have hope, knowing that the Lord is right there with you the entire time, saying “You can do this. Let’s try again."