In 2017, I visited Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, and found myself sitting in a small sitting room crammed with the smiling faces of new friends. They were looking at the biblical invitation where Jesus says, “Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and eat with you and you with me.”

As discussion rolled around the room, I had an impression that the knocking was not on a standard front door, but on a door leading from the inner courtyard of a Middle Eastern house.

I wondered if we were like people at a railway station whose heads are looking the wrong way for the train. We are looking up and out searching for a transcendent, ‘up there’ God whilst the knocking is resounding from the heart of us. Intimately closer than we dreamed.

Is our essence like Mary Poppins’ bag or Narnia’s wardrobe door?  Is there a landscape in our centre that is endless, spacious and extraordinary?

Recently, one of my clients said she felt depressed or  ‘grey’. I asked her to describe the centre of who she is. Was that also grey? She looked up to the ceiling and began to list the colours she saw and then stated with wonder, “It’s like a rainbow!”*

In the heart of our being do we have beauty, power and space for a million dawn horizons? Do we have the breadth and colour to love both friends and enemies? Can we feel the ripples of the earth and oceans beneath our feet? The gentle tears and infectious laughter of others connecting with us; healing us of separateness and loneliness? Is the inner world actually more solid and tangible than the external world we see?

*Quoted with permission.