I could write my life in keys. The first key I remember was to our 1878 farmhouse my parents bought after we moved back from Intercession City, Florida, where daddy had been in Bible College. It was a squarish house that I now know was in the Federalist style of architecture. It was just down the gravel county road from my grandparents’ small farm outside Burlington, Michigan.
Skeleton Key
There was no inside plumbing or running water, but the house was one of my favorite childhood memories. The key to the front and back doors was what Daddy called a “skeleton key,” I guess because it had a thin back bone, a round head, and notched feet that unlocked the door.
Vintage Ford
Then there was the key to my grandfather’s 1932 Ford. That was key to the adventure of running boards, scratchy horsehair upholstery, and putt-putt-putting down the country roads at the speed of a tortoise. When my pastor-parents were out of town for a church convention or state board meetings, Grandpa and Grandma would drive into town to pick me up from school. I sat on the prickly back seat with my chin on the windowsill to watch the farmers plowing the fields or harvesting the crops. Sometimes a killdeer would limp away from the edge of the road to distract us invaders from her eggs that she had literally laid in the edge of the road, where it was hard to tell the gravel from her small spotted eggs.
Daddy and Mother had a “wad” of keys. I always wondered how they knew where they went. Some went to the church and its various doors; some went to our parsonage, to my grandmother’s mobile home, and my other grandparents’ farmhouse, though they ever locked only the front door to their house. On my grandparents’ back stoop there was a bolt that went through a hole in the thick wooden door. The bolt had a string attached to it with a ring on the end, and the string ran through a wooden block nailed beside the door. The string with its ring hung in the corner beside the door where grandma propped a mop on its handle so the mop could hide the string. We just knew to move the mop, grab the ring, and pull so that the bolt would slide out of the holes holding the door. Tight security!
Years later as a budding lyricist, I was to hear a song by Stuart Hamblen, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, that had this line:
Each day is a measure on life’s little string;
When reaching its ending, tired eyes will behold
The string tied to the door latch of my Father’s house—
One day nearer home.
I knew exactly what that image meant, though he didn’t mention the mop.
Vintage Clamp-on Roller Skate
I had two treasured keys of my own, too: the key to my sidewalk skates and a tiny key to a diary I got for my birthday one year. The diary key was so small that I was afraid I’d lose it, so I kept it tied with a ribbon to my journal. What I wrote was never very secret-secure. Ah, but my skate key! That I kept on a string around my neck. Every recess and noon hour, I would skate the sidewalks and black-topped teachers’ parking lot around the school with my friends. Unless there was too much ice and snow, we were skating. Skating was our passion! Skates for sidewalk skating had no boot, then, but clamped onto our saddle shoes; the key closed the clamps until they were tight. The skates also had a leather strap that buckled into place around our ankles to hold the skates in place.
Now the keys to my grown-up life hang on a key holder by our back door. One day when Benjy was small, one of his friends ask him why his parents had so many keys. “Because they have a lot of keyholes, I guess,” he answered. I think that is as good an answer as any. Gates, padlocks, ignitions of cars, trucks, buses, golf carts, guest houses, utility closets, garages—all these have need of keys. Some have been there so long, we’re not sure what they go to, but we’re afraid to throw them away in case the keyhole is still somewhere in our lives.
Hearts and minds and souls have keys, too, and once we discover the key, and someone opens up to us, well, we just never throw away that key. But hearts and souls must be opened with integrity. No heart may be ripped off or broken into when using spiritual keys. These keys must never be used to control tender hearts or to take advantage of the innate longing for Love hidden deep in every soul.
Here are the keys Saint Paul gave us—fruit of the Spirit, he called them. These are well-made keys that never stick or get jammed, but open the strongest bolt locks smoothly and without force. These keys have names engraved on them. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control. How our locked-up relationships need this fistful of keys!
