When You Had to Close the Door

Part 2 of "The Life I Thought It Would Be" series

I know what it feels like to close something you built.

Years ago, I had to walk away from a business called Monkey Toes, a children's shoe store. I had put real hope into it — real time, real energy, real belief that this was something. And when it became clear that it was not going to make it, I had to do one of the hardest things I have ever done: close the door and walk away.

Nobody tells you how much that costs. Not just financially. Emotionally. Spiritually. There is a particular kind of grief that comes with ending something you believed in — and it does not feel like failure so much as it feels like loss. Like a death without a funeral. Like mourning something that most people around you have already moved on from, while you are still standing at the door, wondering what happened.

If you have ever had to close something — a business, a ministry, a career chapter, a vision you carried for years — you know exactly what I am talking about.

What surprised me most was not the practical fallout. It was the silence afterward.

When something you built with your own hands ends, a silence settles where the dream used to live. You find yourself reaching for it — the early morning energy, the sense of purpose, the feeling that you are building toward something — and it is just gone. And nobody around you quite knows what to do with that. They move on. They say the right things. And you smile and nod and carry the grief quietly, because there is no language for mourning a dream.

But that grief is real. And it deserves to be named.

Ecclesiastes 3 tells us there is a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to build up and a time to tear down. A time to plant and a time to uproot.

For a long time, I read those words as a comfort — a reminder that seasons change and God is sovereign over all of them. And that is true. But I have come to hear something else in them as well. Something that acknowledges the full weight of the tearing down, not just the building up. The Preacher does not rush past the hard seasons to get to the good ones. He names them with equal weight. A time to uproot. A time to mourn.

God is not absent from the season of closing. He is not standing on the other side of it waiting for you to get there. He is present in the grief of the ending — in the silence, in the loss, in the painful and necessary work of letting go of something you loved.

That matters. Because too often we treat closed doors as something to get over, when God may be inviting us to move through them with honesty and grace.

Here is what I want you to hear if you are carrying the grief of something you had to end: closing a door is not the same as failing. It is not evidence that you heard God wrong, or that your faith was insufficient, or that you should have tried harder. Sometimes things end. Sometimes the season closes. And the faithfulness is not in keeping something alive past its time — it is in having the courage to build it in the first place, and the grace to release it when the time comes.

I did not understand that fully when I closed Monkey Toes. I understand it better now. Not because the loss went away, but because I have watched God do things in the years since that I could not have imagined standing at that door.

He wastes nothing. Not even the closed doors.

One thing to do today: If you are carrying the grief of something you had to close or walk away from, give yourself permission to mourn it honestly — perhaps for the first time. You do not have to frame it as a blessing yet. You do not have to find the silver lining today. Just bring it to God as it is and trust that He was there when it closed, and He is here with you now.

Next week: "Grieving the Dream You're Still Holding" — what to do with a calling that has not died but has not come true, and how to keep hoping without being consumed by what has not happened yet.