"We demand windows," said C.S. Lewis speaking of the place of literature and imagination in our lives.  "We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own....We demand windows.  Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors."(1)

The same can be said of life in the many-roomed house of God.  We long for glimpses that remind us of the connection between heaven and earth, the invisible world and the visible world, things eternal and things passing away.  We demand windows that lead us farther into the rooms and places Christ left us to imagine.  We search for doors that move us into God's presence and ladders that reveal a well-traversed road between what is here and what is coming. 

The Scriptures consistently depict God dwelling in a house or a palace, a place with a throne room, a banquet room, and room for a multitude.  The people of Israel were well acquainted with the windows that offered glimpses of this house.  God's dwelling was seen as one that reached from the heavens to the places on earth where God caused his name to be remembered.  It was known in experiences like Jacob's:  "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it... This is none other than the house of God...the gate of heaven!" (Genesis 28:16- 17).  It was experienced in the tabernacle that once moved among them as pilgrims and later in their pilgrimages to the temple.  Both dwellings were seen as visible images on earth of the invisible house in heaven.   As they made their ascent into Jerusalem, they prayed that these houses would be one, so they could walk right into God's presence.  Ever-expanding their vision of God's house, altars were built over the places where God had appeared to them.  Though at times as prodigals, their longing for home was a part of their identity as children of the house of God:  "One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek:  that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple" (Psalm 27:4).  The house of God as it reached from heaven to earth was occupied by the King.  As his people, they had been invited inside, where they longed to remain.

We claim this same hopeful heritage as Christians, though it has been made all the more real in Christ.  His very life attests to the truth that the road between heaven and earth is real.  His proclamations of the kingdom among us indicate that there are far more windows and doors than we might have realized.   His depictions of this kingdom, small but potent, waiting to be discovered, declare that we, too, traverse the ladders between heaven and earth—ascending in worship, discovering Christ beside us in our laments, awakening to the house of God in our own neighborhoods.   His death and ascension, likewise, assure us that these rooms we now see in part will one day be fully ours.  "Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father's house there are many dwelling-places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?" (John 14:1-2).   We live our lives in this great house, preparing for the day when we will fully move inside. 

Part of that preparation comes in striving to make our own houses the house of God, making sure our own doors are open and the roads leading to them are well-traversed.  For the great invitation to come inside the house of God is far from an invitation to exclude.  The Israelite's identity as God's people was not one that gave them permission to stave off every neighbor and keep every foreigner at bay.  On the contrary, hospitality was written into the very consciousness of Israel.  They saw that they were living in "none other than the house of God" and as such their very lives were to signify the master of the house.  With an understanding of God's hospitality to her, the woman of Shunem urged the traveling Elisha to stay for a meal.  Later, she said to her husband, "'Look, I am sure that this man who regularly passes our way is a holy man of God.  Let us make a small roof chamber with walls, and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that he can stay there whenever he comes to us'" (2 Kings 4:8-10).  Those who see the rooms of the many-storied house of God recognize the need to build even more. 

Though the hospitality we offer may not include the physical building of new rooms onto our houses, the image is one we cannot forget.  For how often it seems we find God asking us to do the very things that God has done for us.  Hospitality is a command that we are given because we have been given a home.  We welcome others because we have been welcomed.  We build rooms in our lives for strangers, for outcasts, and for neighbors because we, too, were once strangers when the Son prepared us a room. 

We also build rooms simply because our neighbors need them.  In Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous sermon on the Good Samaritan, he distinguishes between asking "What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?" and "What will happen to this man if I don't?"  King then asks himself, "What will happen to humanity if I don't help?  What will happen to the Civil Rights movement if I don't participate?  What will happen to my city if I don't vote?  What will happen to the sick if I don't visit them?"(2)  Choosing to do nothing in terms of hospitality, service, mercy, and justice is still very definitely making a choice.  What will happen to my neighbor if I refuse to see her need for the room I can offer?  What will happen to my neighbor if I fail to see his need for the house of God?

Here, we might further discover that God not only encourages hospitality for the sake of the one who would receive it, but also for the sake of the world that sees it.  In an article in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof made the very public observation that in certain countries where danger and instability are constant threats, "you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians."(3) He continues, "In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows, and shellshocked survivors.  And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic."(4)

Genuine hospitality is not only a logical outworking of life within the rooms of faith, it is also one of our most effective means of being the light Christ has called us to be throughout God's great house.  On multiple levels, the one who builds a room for a neighbor is illustrating the good news, and it may well be the only vision of the kingdom those who witness the act will ever behold.   With Elisha and the Shunammite woman, with Jacob who first saw the ladder between heaven and earth and with Christ who used it to come even nearer, we live our lives in none other than the house of God.  Might the people with whom we come in contact respond to our hospitality with the same surprise that greets us in each new room, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it."

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia. 

1.  "We Demand Windows," Leland Ryken, ed., The Christian Imagination (Colorado Springs: Shaw, 2002), 51.
2.  From A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," eds. Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran (New York:  Warner Books, 1998), 130.
3.  Nicholas D. Kristof, "Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love," The New York Times, February 3, 2008, accessed February 5, 2008.
4. Ibid.