Through the window

Sitting on the lawn at a rousing outdoor revival meeting in southwest Philadelphia this summer, I happened to glance up at a derelict apartment building catty-corner to the crabgrass lot, and spotted someone listening to the speaker from a second-story window.

The homely window has played an unheralded role in the history of mankind. In 1618, Protestant lords threw Catholic regents out a third-story window (“defenestration of Prague”), precipitating the Thirty Years’ War. In 1963 the 35th president of the United States was assassinated by a sniper (says the Warren Commission) from a window of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Nothing is the same from there on in.

Windows have figured in the Bible’s own historical records and not received their due (till today). Good thing Noah made windows in the ark, or he could not have put a dove to flight and learned that waters had receded from the earth (Genesis 8). When the Philistine king saw through a window Isaac caressing his wife, the jig was up and Isaac’s “sister” fib exposed (Genesis 26). A rope dropped through a window in a walled city named Jericho helped two Israelite spies make a getaway (Joshua 2), and a scarlet cord tied at the same saved a harlot’s family afterward (Joshua 6).

Who can really say what happened catty-corner to the park where sat a woman who passed up the fair but listened from a second-story window?

Sisera’s mother at the window wondered at her son’s delay from warring against Israel. Forsooth, dear mum, he is detained in Jael’s tent where she applies a tent peg to his sleeping head, wielding a workman’s hammer (Judges 5). Wife Michal let David down through a window to escape the hounds of Saul (1 Samuel 19), but later despised her husband through a window as he danced with all his might before the Lord (2 Samuel 6). Solomon commissioned beveled frames around the windows of the temple of the Lord (1 Kings 6), and saw that it was good.

Jezebel approached her window with a stately gait to meet her executioner, but not before primping her hair and painting lush mascara on her eyes (2 Kings 9). Young men look through windows for their lovers (Song of Solomon 2); old men pass the day there in a rocker seeing dimly (Ecclesiastes 12) and absorbed in reminiscence of what young men do.

Windows set in spacious cedar houses lacquered in vermilion are ill-fated if raised up in man’s unrighteousness (Jeremiah 22). For death climbs through the windows (Jeremiah 9), just as surely as the frogs of Pharaoh’s day who hopped through open casements onto beds and into kneading bowls (Exodus 8). The locust laughs at glaziers, braving windows like a thief (Joel 2). Beware of open windows if the preacher is long-winded and the oxygen is spent (Acts 20).

I met a man named Jeremiah Pent back in my seminary days. His father, Arnold Pent III, wrote Ten P’s in a Pod, about a journey viewed through windows of a Packard and Pierce Arrow, when his parents with eight kids covered a million miles to sing about their Lord in churches, blaze the trail for homeschool education, and just live by faith. That father, Arnold Van Dyke Pent, was fathered by a man who came to Christ in the following way:

A so-so National League outfielder named Billy Sunday, on a Sunday afternoon in 1887, after a few drinks with teammates at a saloon, was sitting on a curb on Van Buren Street in Chicago and heard the preaching of the Pacific Garden Mission homeless shelter. He got saved, became the most influential evangelist of the early 20th century, and visited Philadelphia in 1915 with one of his biggest outdoor gospel campaigns. A man named Arnold Van Dyke Pent Sr., cigar store owner, did not bother coming outside to survey the hubbub.

Ah, but providentially there was a window in his shop, through which the gospel wafted in. Pent was converted at the age of 45, sold his business, packed the family off to Bible school, and got ordained to ministry.

Following the summer revival meeting in southwest Philadelphia, Bill Pruitt of the New Hope ministry texted me: “8-10 people got saved! Praising the Lord!” I have no reason to gainsay his count. But who can really say what happened catty-corner to the park where sat a woman who passed up the fair but listened from a second-story window?

Email aseupeterson@wng.org