How Faith is like Seeing Through Dirty Windows

 

Have you ever climbed through an open window?

It's a childhood fancy I'll never outgrow. To shove open the glass, push up the window screen, and feel fresh air against your skin and sunshine on your cheeks. That feeling of openness when you swing your leg through and find freedom on the other side.

An open window feels like a portal into Narnia. It's inviting like a world ready to be explored where you can hear nature sing and smell that cleanness. There may be a bite of cold or the burn of sun on the long-baked windowsill.

But some days, the window remains closed. The glass is smudged with fingerprints and dirt, dust from the wind, the yellow of pollen, or the remnant of bugs.

The outside isn't clear as the view is separated by a barrier.

But what we focus on is our decision.

Because life has that too. We're inside, staring through dim glass or trying to catch a reflection in a distorted mirror. The smudges are stark, and maybe we have to adjust to see the tiniest glimpse of life in the outside world, the lampposts of Narnia just out of reach.

But that glimpse is glorious.

It's Hope.

Hope of His promises: that Jesus will return to reward His people and punish all evil. That we do have a Promised Land that will be perfect in beauty, and Jesus will be King and rule, making all good. That there won't be tears and brokenness and sin anymore, for wrong will be right, the winter turned into spring, the witch and all enemies destroyed forever.

There's Hope that everything we do in this age will be rewarded. That our King sees every kindness and every wrong and will bring recompense.

There's Hope that we'll be where He is.

There's Hope that even now, in the todays we've been given, that we do have His Spirit enabling us to have everything we need for live and godliness.

But is your window ever smudged? Does the dust ever cloud your vision and make it harder to see? It sure does mine.

For we see at the present time only a blurry reflection in obscure riddle; at that time, however, we will see face to face. At the present time I know only in part; at that time, however, I will know fully, even as I was fully known.

- 1 Corinthians 3:12

 

 

This staining on a window happened last week. God caused my sister to go into labor with her twins at only 21 weeks, and one of our precious, lil' nieces went to be with Him. As the second twin in the womb holds onto life today, there's prayers mixed with mourning, tears, the pain of loss that God didn't intend to mar this world. We fight in prayer for Baby B, hurt too.

But even in that, He is good.

The tears cleaned a tiny portion of the window, so we could praise. Baby A's little life had purpose; she was prayed over. She caused people to worship. She was loved. She was beautiful and tiny and made in the image of God, and He wrote her days before she was conceived in the womb.

As we mourned, I thought about the windows that are so hard to see through and realized when we keep looking anyway, that's Faith.

Faith is decisive obedience because our Hope is worth it. It's the perseverance to keep running a race when we're soaked with sweat and don't seem to be gaining any ground. It's the persisting prayer for the lost, the fighting to smile through tears, the believing when it's just so hard to see.

While I sobbed for Baby A leaving earlier than I imagined, that Faith was a worship, a song, an "I love you, God, even though I don't understand."

It's hard. I fail a lot.

But whatever is staining your window, making Hope hard to see, I challenge both of us: be found Faithful.

Know what your Hope is and have confident assurance that every promise He has made will come to pass.

Every single promise.

So keep praying. Keep praising. Keep running the race.

When Jesus returns, He is going to shatter every window so we can be free to clamber through and be free in His presence! He will melt all the snow and cause flowers to bloom in the warmth of spring so we can throw the fur coats away. Then we'll sing:

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!

- C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle 

Courage, dear heart.

Now, to have faith is to have a grounded conviction about things hoped for, to be firmly convinced of the certainty of events not seen.

- Hebrews 11:1

Now, a hope that is already realized is by definition not a hope. Who, after all, when it comes to something he already has, hopes for it? If it is something still to come, though, on which we are setting our hope, it is with patient endurance that we wait for it.

- Romans 8:25 

 

~♥~