He Opened The Windows Anyway

The window over the sink has been painted shut for six years, and on a Tuesday in February, for no reason she could give anybody, she goes at it with a blade.

Six coats. She can count them in the cut, cream over green over a pink that must have been somebody's idea in another decade. It takes her most of an hour, and she breaks two blades and swears once and apologizes to nobody in particular, and then she gets the heel of both hands under the sash and the whole thing gives all at once with a crack like a knuckle.

And the city comes in.

Not a view. She always had the view. What comes in is the sound: a train two streets over, somebody's radio, a bus taking the corner too fast, a dog that has opinions, a kid being called in for the second time. It arrives all at once in a kitchen that has been sealed for six years, and she stands there with the cold coming over the sill and her hands stinging, and she is nearly in tears about a noise.

You have a window like that, and you know exactly when it shut.

You used to pray for the wider church. For believers in places you had only heard of, for people under pressure a long way from here, for a whole company of people you will never meet. And then somewhere along the way it got thin. It started to feel like reading names off a map. Talking about strangers, into a room where nothing came back, in a house that has not held another believer in about two years. So you stopped. Not with a decision. The way a window gets painted shut, one coat at a time, none of them meaning anything by it.

The window was open before the trouble started

There is a famous verse about a man who prayed while a law was being used against him, and everybody remembers the lions, and almost nobody notices the joinery.

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.Daniel 6:10

Read what the sentence assumes. It does not say he opened his windows in defiance. It says his windows were open. Already. That is a detail about a house, dropped in as background, and it means the window had been like that for years before anybody signed anything.

And read where it faces. Toward Jerusalem, which is somewhere between five and six hundred miles away, across a desert he was not going to cross, in a country he had been taken out of as a boy. Jerusalem at that point in his life was rubble and other people. He was not looking at anything. There was nothing in that direction he could reach, do anything about, or ever verify.

He faced it anyway, three times a day, for decades.

You have a window in the house you are actually in, and it faces a people. Daniel 6:10 puts it in writing that his windows were open and that he had been doing this long before, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence out of a small room faster than any road ever moved a body.

Notice what Daniel is not doing. He is not enduring an interruption. There is nothing in that chapter that treats his distance from Jerusalem as a temporary inconvenience to be tolerated until normal service resumed. The man prayed toward that city for the rest of his life and died a long way from it, and Scripture does not present a single hour of that as second best.

You are joined to God's people across every mile of that distance, and the joining is not something you have to maintain. Ephesians 4:4 says it flatly, one body and one Spirit, and the Spirit that is in a believer six thousand miles from your kitchen is the Spirit that is in you.

What actually joins you to people you will never meet

Here is the thing that had gone quietly wrong, and it is worth naming, because it is not a failure of yours.

You had been assuming that connection is made of contact. That two believers are joined by having been in a room together, having spoken, having a face to attach to a name, and that in the absence of all that you were doing something imaginary. Talking about strangers.

But the New Testament does not build the body out of contact. It builds it out of one Spirit. That is the tissue. That is the actual joining, and it is not a poetic way of saying we all like the same things. There is one Spirit, and He is in a woman in a country you cannot find on a map without help, and He is in you at this sink, and that makes the two of you the same body in the only sense the Bible ever uses.

Which means the word stranger was never accurate. It was accurate about your information. It was never accurate about your relation.

You were never talking about strangers, not once, not in any of those years. It is written as one body and one Spirit, and the same Spirit who was listening in your kitchen was already at work in the room you were praying toward.

And this is why the window matters, and why an open one is not a consolation prize.

A window does not shorten a distance. Daniel's window did not move Jerusalem one inch closer. What a window does is give a direction to a person who has one, and there is an enormous difference between a person facing nothing and a person facing something they cannot reach. One of those is sealed in. The other one is in the room with the whole city coming in over the sill.

It is already yours, this share in a people you will never be in a room with. Nothing written anywhere measures a share by miles, and His Spirit does not measure it that way either.