I always choose the window seat.
Every time I fly, during takeoff (or descent), when the altitude tweaks my perspective, and I look down on the residential boxes in the outskirts, I ache.
These little shelters that in many ways form an anchor and an axis for our existence get so minuscule in a matter of minutes as the horizon stretches out. And I start to wonder…
What have those bricks and shingles seen over the years? What has passed through those thresholds? What stories have been written? What tragedies are being lived out? What quiet victories are yet to be seen?
That house right there—when was the last time its walls heard a good, long, shared belly laugh?
That house over there—it shelters the imago dei—living, breathing images of God. Do they even realize it?
In which of these little boxes did a wife recently tell her husband, “This just isn’t working”?
In which of these little boxes did parents quake in elation at the return of their prodigal son?
In which of these little boxes did a pervert pulverize a girl’s innocence?
In which of these little boxes did a kid hear some lie about who he was, and it took root, and thirty years later he’s still struggling to disbelieve it?
In which of these little boxes does a grandmother greet every morning with weak coffee and a strong hallelujah, a woman whose life has been one heartache after another, yet she has always kept despair at a distance, and she’s maintained her joy and her hallelujah, and because it is pock-marked, windburnt, and grizzled, it is the strongest and sweetest hallelujah imaginable.
At this altitude, I feel the ache of millennia. Sorrow and sin and humility and faith and pain and love all gathered under the rooftops of suburbia. And we can wrestle with all of it, with the goodness of God, and the reasons why, and the sovereignty, and all of it, and we should.
But if you squint hard at these little boxes, you can see a thumb—God’s very thumb—as it swipes under the very last tear duct, as it dries the very last tear, as it smears the very last salty streak across the very last cheek.
Question marks dissolved. Justice perfected. All things put to rights. You can see all of it, right there with your tray table stowed, right there from seat 27F.
This is why I always choose the window seat.
yodelingcatfish 