The Window on The Way

The last thing I did before leaving our old house was look through the window beside the front door.

I had walked past that window thousands of times over eight years, usually without giving it much thought. That's what we do with the things that are always there. Front doors. Kitchen tables. The sound of somebody we love coming down the stairs.

We assume there will be another day.

The house is almost a hundred years old, which was one of the reasons I loved it when we bought it. Old houses have character. This is what people say before they own one.

After you own one, you discover that “character” often means there is water somewhere water should not be, a mysterious electrical problem, or a repairman standing in your basement saying, “Well, I've never seen that before.”

Still, I loved the house. And I especially loved that window.

It was from the 1930s, framed in iron and made of thick, textured glass. Technically, the glass was clear. But if you looked through it, nothing on the other side was quite clear at all. You could see light and color and movement.

But edges softened. Faces blurred. The world bent slightly around itself.

If one of the girls was playing outside, I could tell she was there, but I couldn't necessarily tell what she was doing. I could see somebody coming up the walk but sometimes had to wait until they reached the door to know who it was.

I watched autumn turn red and gold through that glass. I watched snow cover the yard. I watched children and neighbors move through the little distorted world on the other side. And every spring, after enough winter to make you question several of your Midwestern life choices, green would begin appearing again.

I could see it. Just not perfectly.

Which, honestly, was pretty good training for the next eight years.

When we moved into that house, I thought I knew where my life was going, and that's another thing human beings are very good at. We take whatever is happening right now, add a few assumptions, sprinkle in a little optimism, and call it a plan.

I had one, or so I thought. Then life happened.

I couldn't see that we would plant a church just as COVID arrived and the whole world suddenly shut its doors. I couldn't see that a few years later we would close that church and I would find myself wondering what had happened not only to the ministry but to the calling that had shaped most of my adult life.

I couldn't see two little girls becoming young women right there in front of me, which is one of the tricks time plays on parents. Children seem to remain children for years, and then one afternoon you look across the room and wonder who these women are and what exactly they have done with your little girls.

There were meals in that house. There was laughter. There were arguments. There were friendships and disappointments, celebrations and slammed doors, people arriving and people leaving. There were ordinary mornings when nothing important seemed to be happening at all.

Which may be some of the most important moments we ever get.

And then there was one morning when the window beside the door flashed red and white. Ambulance lights. My wife had collapsed upstairs and they couldn’t save her.

Even now, that sentence looks strange sitting there on the page.

I hadn't seen that coming through the window.

Of course I hadn't.

That's the point.

We don't.

For all our planning and praying and worrying and preparing, most of life arrives without asking our permission.

Love does and loss does. Children grow up. Careers change. Bodies age. Doors close. New ones open. Somebody calls. Somebody leaves.

One day you are making dinner, and the next thing you know eight years have gone by and you are standing in an empty house looking through an old piece of glass.

I suppose that is why Paul's strange old phrase came back to me:

For now we see through a glass, darkly.

1 CORINTHIANS 13:12

I have heard that verse most of my life, but I don't think I understood it quite as well until I had that window.

We see. But not completely. Enough to know there is something on the other side, but not enough to know exactly what it means.

Honestly, I don't particularly like that arrangement. I would prefer clarity. I would like God to explain Himself from time to time. A memo would be lovely. Something along the lines of:

Jay, here is what I am doing. Here is why I am doing it. Here are the people involved. Here is how long it will take. Please see the attached spreadsheet.

Wouldn’t that be nice? But apparently this is not how the Kingdom of God operates.

Instead, Jesus kept pointing at things.

A seed and a bird and a field and some bread and a weed and a sheep and a coin somebody lost under the furniture and a child standing nearby.

He would pick up some completely ordinary piece of life and say, in effect:

Look again.

The Kingdom of God is like this.

He didn't think God was hiding in the places we usually look for God. Or at least not only there. The Kingdom was breaking through everywhere.

In dirt. At dinner. On boats. In vineyards. At weddings.

Among sick people and fishermen and irritating religious leaders and children who obviously had no respect for the adult conversation currently taking place.

God was doing something right in front of them.

The trouble was seeing it.

And I think the same thing might be true of my life. Maybe I had walked past too many windows without seeing. Little moments when the light came through differently.

A conversation or a failure or a meal or a person I almost overlooked.

Something one of my daughters said or a garden or a dog or a song or a funeral.

A ridiculous memory I had carried around for forty years without realizing it had something to teach me.

Windows. Things through which, if I paid attention long enough, I might catch a glimpse of something larger.

Like Grace. Like Meaning. Like The Kingdom.

There are things in my story I wish had never happened. There are decisions I regret. Losses I would undo in an instant if heaven gave me the chance.

Faith does not require us to pretend otherwise.

But I believe that even in places I would never have chosen, God has not abandoned the story. The glass may be dark. The view may be distorted. But there is still light coming through.

And sometimes, often later, you look back and realize you can see something now that you couldn't see then.

That is where Windows on the Way came from. It isn't really an attempt to explain life. I've spent enough years trying to do that. It's an attempt to pay attention to life. To tell stories and hold them up to the light. To laugh at some of them. To grieve others. To ask what we might have missed while we were busy living them.

These stories happen to be mine because those are the ones I've been given, but I hope they eventually lead you back to yours. Because I believe that in the life you are already living there are windows too.

Places where grace has been closer than you thought. Moments that seemed ordinary but weren't. Something that hurt. Something that healed. Something beautiful you nearly walked past. A person who changed you. A failure that humbled you. A joy you did not earn.

Maybe we can look through some of those windows together. And maybe, every now and then, the glass will become just clear enough for us to recognize the Kingdom on the other side.

But here's the thing I nearly missed about that old window.

It was beside a door.

All those years I had been looking through the glass, and three feet away was a way out into the Kingdom coming. Eventually faith asks more of us than seeing.

The first followers of Jesus were called followers of the Way. Not followers of the Explanation, nor followers of the Five-Year Strategic Plan.

The Way. A road. A life. Someone to follow.

Jesus didn't promise His disciples that they would always understand where He was taking them. He simply said,

Follow me.

And so on that last day, I stood for a moment inside that old house and looked through the window. Behind me were eight years I now knew by heart. A whole life gathered inside those rooms.

Outside the window was something I could not make out. My next life, I suppose. Or whatever comes next. And the thing is I am more comfortable with that than I once was.

Not comfortable exactly.

Let's not get carried away.

But maybe more willing.

Because faith is not seeing clearly and then stepping forward. If you can see everything, you don't need much faith. Faith is opening the door when the glass is still blurry. It is believing there is a Kingdom coming out there even when you cannot see very far into it. And it is trusting that the King is already somewhere ahead of you.

So I opened the door and I walked out.

And I am walking out still.

Into a life I cannot completely see. Into work I am still discovering. Into love and family and loss and possibility.

Into the Kingdom again.

I don’t know exactly where I am going, but I know Who I am following. And for now, that is enough light for the road, and maybe that's all any of us ever really gets.

A window.

A door.

And enough faith to walk through it.

See the Story. Find Meaning. Walk the Way.