Spiritual Window Stains

As my clock alarm, the enemy of my sleep, beeped loudly at me, I rolled over to look out the window and gaze down toward the ocean. Instead, I saw clouds on my balcony, large clouds bursting forth rain and relentlessly drowning the earth around me. This might be a common sight in Seattle but it’s rare in Malibu and it’s the first big rain I can remember since last December. I tried hard to focus on the clouds and the cotton-cloaked buildings on the Pepperdine campus. Slowly, cars and buildings came into focus. People were leaving for work and the streets were awakening to new day. It was the only view I had, for a minute. I then adjusted my focus, similar to the way you have to change your focus when you move your eyes from a distant object to a close object. I then saw a different story, hundreds of rain drops on my window were sitting there looking back at me. Some decided to make their journey to the bottom of the window and into a pool of rain while others sat, waiting for another rain drop to roll down the window and collect it on its journey downward. I couldn’t look at both stories at the same time. Both were interesting and compelling but I figured the window was designed for me to look through it and the world beyond, not at it. This is why we clean windows, right? They are not meant to be seen, which is why people draw large white Xs on them in order to prevent people from killing themselves by walking through them.

It occurred to me that we look at the bible in two similar ways. The bible, a window to the story of God and the stories of his people, provides us with great depth and rich insight into a few thousand years of the eternal story of God. But, if we adjust our focus to the window itself (the books of the bible, textual criticism, linguistic peculiarities, apparent contradictions and errors, cultural imperatives and exegetical problems), we can quickly find ourselves in a parallel story of authorship, audiences, occasions for writing and literary conversations. And while there is certainly a time and place for these conversations (having spent years in college and seminary I know this too well), the real purpose of the “window” is to tell the grander, overarching, story of God’s faithfulness which ultimately points us to Jesus. If we miss that story, the window has failed to serve its true purpose. It doesn’t exist primarily for our intellectual pleasure (although we can love God with our mind here), nor does it exist primarily as a literary curiosity, code to crack, blueprint to decipher, or check-list to follow. It exists to tell a greater story through and beyond its pages. It exists to tell the world of the story of God’s faithfulness found in full expression through the life of Jesus. If we miss this in looking through the window, then we’ll only ever see rain.