Looking out the Window

by Donna Poole

It was a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” just like Alexander had in one of my favorite children’s books by Judith Viorst.

Nothing could make him happy. Our normally cheerful little grandson was still sobbing when they strapped him into his car seat. He was thinking of little boy problems doubtless as consuming to little boys as grandma problems are to grandmas. Ignoring the happy sounds of siblings, he kept crying.

Until the car slowed, and he looked out of his window.

They were in the McDonald’s drive-through! Sobs stopped, and with tears still wet on his cheeks he exclaimed, “I like people now!”

Strapped in our seats on this backroad journey Home, we may hide our sobs from others, but our troubles can consume our thoughts and emotions until we are too exhausted to even like people. We’re numb. If any Scripture verse resonates with us it’s, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.”

We might even mutter with the long dead Shakespeare:

“Double double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”

We’re tired of the trouble, the fire, and the cauldron. Like my little grandson, head down, we ignore the happy sounds of siblings. Our focus is on our tears. Until we look out the window.

When we look out of the window our focus leaves ourselves and we find joy. We learn to say with Helen Keller who surely knew the sting of sorrow, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

Instead of sighing over “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” we sing over Jesus’ words in John 16:33, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

I don’t know what the metaphorical window is that reunites you with joy, but mine is God, His Word, His creation, and His people. Sometimes a window opens when I read something breathtakingly beautiful written by one of God’s people.

This morning I read this by George MacDonald:

“The shadows of the evening that precedes a lovelier morning are drawing down around us both. But our God is in the shadow as in the shine, and all is and will be well. Have we not seen His glory in the face of Jesus? And do we not know him a little? . . . This life is a lovely school time, but I never was content with it. I look for better—oh, so far better! I think we do not yet know the joy of mere existence. To exist is to be a child of God; and to know it, to feel it, is to rejoice evermore. May the loving Father be near you and may you know it, and be perfectly at peace all the way into the home country, and to the palace home of the living one—the Life of our life.

“. . . My God, art Thou not as good as we are capable of imagining Thee? Shall we dream a better goodness than thou hast ever thought of? Be Thyself, and all is well with us.”

 My window is open a bit more now, and I see people who need my prayers. I like people. I love them. And that’s where I find joy.