Wake up, my heart! Wake up, O lyre and harp! I will wake the dawn with my song. Psalm 57:8

Washing Windows

            Clean windows!  Don't you just love 'em?!  Yesterday, the weather was finally warm enough to turn off the furnace and do some window washing.  I know that this harsh winter seemed to many here in the Midwest as if it would never end.  For our family it was particularly stressful for many reasons:  a freak tornado in November that destroyed a nearby town where many friends live, our barn fire in December, my final graduate/thesis residency in January, our son, his wife, their baby daughter and two German Shepherds staying with us for several weeks while awaiting the arrival of their household belongings from the UK, brutally cold temps for weeks on end with the resulting litany of broken appliances, pipes, and stranded cars, running out of firewood when LP prices were at their highest, illness, traveling on treacherous roads, allowing our teenage sons to travel on treacherous roads, wrangling for weeks with our mortgage company about getting the barn-fire funds deposited, the death of a close friend, the sudden resignation and moving out of state of another, and so on, and so on.  Such an exhausting few months!  Spray bottle and paper towel in hand, it felt great to wash away some of the grime of this bleak-in-so-many-ways season.

            One thing that's not quite so easy to wash away, though, is the exhaustion that has resulted from meeting the challenges of these past few months.  As a man, fully human while being fully God, Jesus, too, suffered exhaustion.  His solution?

 Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.  Mark 1:35 (NIV)

 But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.  Luke 5:16 (NLT)

             In her book Walking on Water Madeleine L'Engle writes, "I sit on my favourite rock, looking over the brook, to take time away from busyness, time to be.  I've long since stopped feeling guilty about taking being time; it's something we all need for our spiritual health, and often we don't take enough of it" (2).  For one like me who is refreshed and renewed by being out in nature, L'Engle's words resonate.  Can one be while sitting inside by the fire?  Yes, of course!  But Augustine wrote, "It is solved by walking," meaning that walking out in nature is not only restorative, but can help us think through and solve problems.  What little walking had to be done outside this past winter was anything but restorative!  To be outside was to do battle.  It involved doing, not being.

            The same can be true during wintry seasons in our lives as we "walk along the way" in the workplace, the home, and even in the church.  Have you, like me, allowed yourself to be robbed of time for being by so much doing?  Maybe your winter, too, was harsh in many ways like mine.  Maybe it involved weathers other than just those outside your front door, personal weathers of stress or disappointment, or of loss and grief.  Have you recuperated from all that doing?

            I encourage you to wash away the accumulated grime of the season, so to speak, so that you, too, can begin to see clearly again.  The quality of the light shining through clean windows is bright and filled with hope.

Daye Phillippo

April 2014