The Glass Has Not Been Cleaned In Years

You stopped seeing it years ago.

The glass has a film on it. Not dirt exactly, more a general gray, the kind that builds up so slowly that no single day is the day it got worse.

Cooking goes onto it. Dust. Whatever comes off the street. And the light coming through has been dropping by a percent or two a year for as long as you have lived there, and at no point was there a moment where you noticed a change.

And you have described that room to people as dark.

It may be dark. But some of what you are calling a dark room is a quarter inch of something on the inside of the glass, and that is not the same problem, and it takes five minutes.

The light shineth in darkness

John opens his gospel with a line about light that is in the present tense and stays there.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. (John 1:5, King James Version)

The light shineth in darkness.

You are standing in a room where light is already arriving, and no film on any glass has ever once been able to stop what was coming. John 1:5 says the light shineth in darkness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has called her own room dark for years.

Look at the tense, because John chose it deliberately. Shineth. Present, continuous, ongoing.

Not: the light shone. Not: the light will shine. It is shining, now, whether or not anything about the situation suggests it.

And the second clause is the honest one. The darkness comprehended it not. Which in that older English means did not grasp it, did not take it in, did not receive it.

So the failure named in the verse is not a failure of the light. The light did its part. Something on the receiving end did not take it up.

You have been living in a room where the light never once stopped arriving, and what did not get through has never once been a shortage at the source. The Spirit of God is what makes that more than a figure of speech, and John 1 is where the shining stands written.

What is actually on the glass

Now the practical half, and this is genuinely the most useful five minutes in this whole set of articles.

Household glass that has not been cleaned in a few years loses a real amount of light. Not a trivial amount. A noticeable fraction, and more on the inside than the outside in a kitchen, because cooking puts a film on it that holds dust.

And it is entirely invisible. That is the whole problem. Nobody can see it, because there is nothing to compare it against, and because it arrived at a rate of nothing per day.

You are not somebody who let a window go, and a change that happens at nothing per day has never once asked anybody to notice it. John 1:5 keeps the shining in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that without a word of blame in it.

The test is simple. Wipe a patch about the size of your hand in the middle of the pane, and then stand back and look at the window.

You will be able to see the patch. That difference, across the whole window, is light you already own and have not been receiving.

You are able to recover something today that has been leaving slowly for years, and five minutes with a cloth has never once been too small an act to change a room. What is written in John 1:5 has the light shining regardless, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what has been in the way.

And I want to be careful here, because this is a site that does not tell anybody to buy anything and does not hand out chores.

This is not housework. I am not telling you the room needs cleaning, and I am not making a point about the state of your home. This is one pane of glass, on the inside only, with a wet cloth, for five minutes, because it is the cheapest light available to anybody anywhere.

You are not being handed a job about the state of your house, and one pane of glass has never once been a comment on how you live. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a practical thing practical, and John 1 is the ground under it.

The inside only

So here is the instruction, and the limits on it matter as much as the instruction.

The inside only. Do not go outside, do not get a ladder, do not open anything you have to lean out of. Nothing here is worth a fall.

A wet cloth. Nothing bought, nothing sprayed. Warm water and a cloth does almost all of it, and a dry cloth afterward if you want it clear rather than merely clean.

Five minutes. One pane. If there are several, do the one you look out of most, and stop. Then put a plant on the sill, because the whole reason to do this is that the sill just got brighter than it was this morning.

You have made a room measurably better in five minutes, and one pane of glass has never once been too small a thing to change what a window does. John 1:5 says the light shineth in darkness, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes five minutes count for what five minutes actually did.

You are able to give that room more light before lunch, and a wet cloth has never once been less effective than a better window. John 1:5 says the light shineth in darkness, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman standing at her own glass with a cloth in her hand.