Lately I’ve been feeling flat. Like Bilbo said in Fellowship of the Ring: “I feel like butter scraped over too much bread.” There were a couple of days last week where I felt nothing at all. No joy, no sadness, no anger, nada. A scary place to be. It tells me I’m overdoing it, that my heart is suffering. That I need to feed it better.
So I picked up a book I read some years back, called “Windows of the Soul” by Ken Gire. If you’ve never read it, you really should. In the introduction, he says,
“We reach for God in many ways. Through our sculptures and our scriptures. Through our pictures and our prayers. Through our writing and our worship. And through them he reaches for us.”
And remember how spiritual life is about response, not initiative? He goes on to say of God, “His search begins with something said. Ours begins with something heard. His begins with something shown. Ours, with something seen. Our search for God and His search for us meet at windows in our everyday experience.
“These are windows of the soul. In a sense, it is something like spiritual disciplines for the spiritually undisciplined. In another sense, it is the most rigorous discipline of disciplines — the discipline of awareness. For we must always be looking and listening if we are to see the window and hear what is being spoken to us through them… we must be aware, at all times and in all places, because windows are everywhere, and at any time we may find one. Or one may find us.”
Brilliant! He’s nailed it! Praise God, someone gets it. I pray we will, too. Time to sign off, and look through the window.