Bird in the Garage- sound familiar?

I have a garage with an automatic door opener. I opened the garage to get the car out so I could get the lawn mower out to take care of the two week's worth of grass I had from vacation.  I had left the garage door up. This garage has two windows at the back of the garage.  When I brought the mower back after finishing the mowing, there was a bird beating against a window in the back. I watched for several minutes. It was a good size bird. I kept trying to get out of the window. It would back up and fly into the window. Finally, I decided I had had enough so I got a broom and got between the bird and the window and swung at the bird. It turned around saw the wide open space where the garage door had been, and flew out of the garage.

It struck me that I had been that bird, and I think a lot of other people have been that bird. We are so narrowly focused and see only one source of light and we keep trying to get to it, and fail, and fail, and never realize that there is another way out of the mess, if we would just turn around.  A friend of mine, Ernie Campbell, who used to be the pastor at the Riverside Church in New York, wrote a book called "Locked in a room with open doors."  He suggested that we often keep ourselves in a place thinking that we are locked in when the doors are really unlocked if we would just try them.

There may well be a large open way out of our situation if we would stop beating ourselves against the window and look around.  It might actually be in the opposite direction of where we are trying to go. Like the bird had to fly in the opposite direction to get out of the garage, but it would have never made it out of that window.