Windows on The World

Writing for me has become a kind of therapy, or window into where I am at the moment.  I have looked through many windows in my life time.  Windows that separated me...and windows that enveloped me into a world that I had never experienced before.

Windows that separate come to mind first.  There was glass that separated me  from my son the first time I saw him.  It was that old style nursery room wire meshed glass as I recall it.  We were living in rural western New York at the time and it was a county hospital in a not too prosperous part of the state.  Glass no touching...the birth was difficult and the c-section required my absence in that hospital.  Isn't it funny how the rules change from hospital to hospital? I am not complaining just observing.  The feeling that I was outside that window was exclusion and separation for the safety of those I love.

Separation is one of the functions of a window.  Protection is another element of what a window does.  Windows form boundaries and both keep things out and keep things in.  Take it from a person who loves to ride motorcycles...bugs hurt!  There are times when windows are a good thing.

My friends worried about my breaking the law by speeding when saw this picture.  Sometimes getting there sooner is much better. Even here a window is my view of the world around me.

All of them are windows on the world that surrounds me. A window implies safe distance and a level of disengagement...there we go. Windows make us observers and not participants in life. Yet, we have the illusion that we are somehow engaged in the action.  I guess that is why, watching sports for me was never about "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat."  Remember they get paid for that stuff...what is the difference between acting and football?  Both are entertainment, both there is work involved, both seek to engage my attention...but neither get me off the couch. Both leave me an observer.

So where is the prayer walk in this?

Prayer does not let me be a disengaged observer of events.  As I an watching and as life is flying by me at 73 miles per hour,  prayer calls me to needs outside of my bubble of glass and steal.  A sunrise becomes cause for celebration, a new unique event for all awake enough to see.  A person on the side of the road becomes an occasion for prayer. Where are they walking to? Why are they alone? Why don't they look up? Lord Jesus, work in the life of this person in grace and power.

When I am listening, windows become opportunities for the One who Created it all to speak.  He speaks of needs, of hopes, of dreams, and of impacts that will not be known in this present world. The impact of a prayer of a passerby prayed one day going slightly over the posted speed limit will not be know except in eternity.  But he for a moment became more that an observer. Prayer changes things...sometimes in ways that I know and sometimes in way that I will never know. Praying as I go, brings change in me sometimes it is in ways I know and sometimes in ways too subtle for me to catch.

Make it a prayer walk today...