Talk about things hidden in plain sight! There it was! As the sun tilted its way across the western sky, it was pouring golden light through the full-length living room window. How many times it had done this without notice I’ve not calculated, but on this fateful afternoon, the up-til-now concealed truth was on less-than-lovely, unmissable display! What had, just hours earlier, seemed a normal sunlight-admitting sheet of glass, was now showing its true nature – failed seals had allowed all kinds of dirt particles and fogginess to build up inside the panes and strong, solar rays were now pointing out what had been hidden previously. Probably for months this condition existed, blocking much of the sun’s access to our home each afternoon. Cleaning the interior and the exterior of this window would yield little improvement. The problem existed on the inside, out of reach of Windex and rags. To take full advantage of the sun’s power, the only solution remaining was an expensive one – trash the old window and replace it with a new one (we’re still working on that).
Our souls, too, can develop Truth-obscuring build-up, a fogginess blocking the fulness of the Son’s brilliance. Like a stealthy, symptom-free disease, it grows quietly in the background, hindering progress, slowly adding scar tissue, reducing our soul’s hearing, and little by little acclimating us to the weakening of our resistance to the wiles of the Enemy. The initial source of this often begins early, in childhood, right in our own homes. Misread messages, various kinds of abuse, dysfunctional interactions with significant others, along with our own sin nature, all contribute to the erosion of our soul’s health. Dr. James Dobson, of ‘Focus on the Family,’ once said: “Children are the best receivers of information, but they are the worst interpreters of information.” But now, through the glorious gift of our salvation, the war, for us, has been won so we are no longer prisoners of that war. But we may be prisoners still of hidden things, damaging things, things preventing us from joyously living our in-Christ lives, things accusing us, things demoralizing us, things depressing us – things Jesus has already paid for! “ . . . we must let go of every wound that has pierced us and the sin we so easily fall into . . . we focus our attention and expectation on Jesus who birthed faith within us and who leads us forward into faith’s perfection.” Hebrews 12: 1,3, TPT. You know what? We can do this! Jesus is with us and he is for us! He stands us up in his victory! And he’ll go the distance! Got any clouded windows you need to get rid of? PD
