Cleaning Our Windows Two Years Late

The other week we got our windows cleaned. For the first time. In two years of living here. It took about 45 minutes, cost £15, and it was like magic. It’s amazing, it’s like being in a different flat – the rooms are brighter, the outside world is a different colour!

But the funny thing is, before they got cleaned, as much as we knew they were a bit gross, we didn’t think it was making that much difference. We mostly didn’t think about it all. That was just what the windows were like, that was just what the sunshine was like, that was just what colour the outside world was. It was just normal.

And so this grime-based window episode has reminded me that just because something is normal, doesn’t mean that it’s right. Just because something is normal doesn’t mean that it could be wonderfully different. Just because something is normal doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem that needs to be solved, and really can be solved.

Tonight at my church a friend of mine was baptised – she’s a student who grew up agnostic/atheist and while at uni actually started asking the big questions of life, is there any meaning to it all or is it all just an accident? Is there such a thing as good and evil, and if not why does it feel so much like there is? And she became convinced that actually not only was there a lot of good reasons to believe that Jesus was real and he had come back from the dead, but that actually Jesus and the Bible made tonnes better sense of the real world we live in than the vague ideas she’d grown up with. And looking back on it, she said something I found really interesting, she said, “I and the other agnostics I was surrounded with had realised one great certainty about the universe, that there was no God, and decided that all the other big questions, how life wasn’t pointless if it was all an accident, how there could be real good and evil, could look after themselves.”

And what I thought was really interesting about that is that I bet if you’d asked her back then, she’d have never described it quite like that. Most people in our particular corner of white Western culture decide that life’s big questions can look after themselves, and assume that there is no God, without ever really doing those things consciously and carefully – that’s just the obvious assumption. That’s just what the windows have always been like. To stretch the metaphor, it’s like the windows are so grimy we can’t see anything outside, just enough light gets through for us to get on with, since we’ve got plenty of led screens inside anyway, and so we get by on the assumption that there isn’t actually anything much worth bothering about outside, and not asking too many questions about where that dim glow is emanating from. And everything on the shining screens that fill our every spare moment is designed to keep us occupied, keep us entertained, and keep our eyes adjusted to their artificial light and unaccustomed to the sunlight we’ve never properly seen.

But just because that’s normal doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because that’s normal doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be wonderfully, wonderfully different.

This is why I love talking to people about Jesus, because I get to tell people the truth that the world is so much brighter than we assume it is. That life is a gift from a God who loves us. That we are not accidents, none of us. That our lives are not meaningless or even just average, but suffused with infinite and glorious significance. That we are not unimportant or unloved but that the Creator of a billion galaxies has crafted us in his image, to reflect his glorious nature, and even though we have ignored and avoided him, turned on each other and destroyed his world, he cares about us so passionately that he came as human being and died an agonised and humiliating death to suffer himself all the pain and shame that we’ve created. That we can know the God who made us, and be a genuine part of what he’s doing to redeem this broken world and right every wrong. That ultimately love will overcome hatred and loneliness, that ultimately life will overwhelm death, and that ultimately light will outshine darkness.

Maybe you’ve always assumed that’s rubbish and wishful thinking. I’m just saying that it’s normal to assume that. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s right. Why not take a look outside?