The Ache From The Window

I can already tell this one is going to be a difficult one to write.

I spent my childhood looking into windows. This is not metaphor, or not only metaphor. I mean that I literally stood outside in the cold and looked through lit windows at the lives unfolding behind them.

I remember the holidays most vividly.

Standing in sub-zero temperatures, locked outside, watching families through the glass. Children tearing into presents, the warm chaos of wrapping paper and delight. A Thanksgiving table, people passing dishes, the iconic gold light that pours out of houses where people are gathered and fed and safe. I would stand there, cold in a way that went deeper than the temperature, and just watch.

I didn’t even want what they had.

Not really. That seemed too much to want. What I wanted was a fraction of it. Table scraps. The leftover warmth, the overflow, the spillage from a feast I knew wasn’t mine. I wasn’t asking to be at the table. I was asking to be near enough to catch some of the heat radiating off it. Emotionally and physically both, because by then the two had become the same hunger.

There’s a posture you learn standing outside windows as a child. You learn to want small. You learn that asking for the feast is dangerous, that the safest hunger is the one that asks only for scraps, that hoping for less protects you from the devastation of hoping for more and being denied.

For a long time I couldn’t distinguish between being locked outside as something that happened to me and being locked outside as who I was.

This is the almost indirect violence of certain childhoods. They don’t just inflict experiences, they install identities. Being on the wrong side of the glass enough times stops feeling like circumstance and starts feeling like essence. “You are the kind of person who looks in rather than sits at the table.” You are the one outside. The exclusion becomes not a thing being done to you but a fact about you, as fixed as your eye color.

The difference matters more than it might seem. A feeling, however painful, is weather. It moves through, it changes, it doesn’t define the landscape it passes over. But an identity is the landscape itself. And when “locked outside” becomes identity rather than feeling, you carry the cold indoors with you. You can be welcomed to a hundred tables and still feel the glass between you and the warmth, because the barrier has migrated from the world into yourself.

Scripture is insistent that our truest identity is given, not accumulated from our experiences. Paul writes that we are no longer strangers and aliens but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19). The household. The inside. The exact place I spent my childhood pressed against the window of.

But knowing this theologically and living it are different things. I can affirm that I’m a member of God’s household while still feeling, in my body, like someone who belongs outside in the cold.

The identity God assigns and the identity my childhood installed are at war, and the old one fights dirty because it got there first.

There’s a story I’ve never been able to read comfortably. A Canaanite woman comes to Jesus, begging healing for her daughter, and Jesus, uncharacteristically, rebuffs her. He says it isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs (Matthew 15:21-28).

And she says: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.“

I used to read her response as beautiful humility, and it is. But I recognize something else in it now, something I know from the inside: the posture of someone who has learned to ask for scraps because asking for the feast feels presumptuous. Who has been taught that her hunger should be modest, that wanting the full portion is overreach, that the safest request is for the crumbs.

But here’s what undoes me about the story: Jesus doesn’t give her crumbs. He commends her faith and heals her daughter completely. He doesn’t honor the smallness of her ask by giving her something small. He gives her the whole thing.

This is the part I struggle to believe applies to me.

I learned to want table scraps as a survival mechanism, and the wanting-small got so deep that even now, offered the feast, I instinctively reach for the crumbs. I tell God I’d be grateful for just a little warmth, a fraction of belonging, the overflow rather than the portion. And I think He looks at that the way Jesus looked at the Canaanite woman. Not honoring the smallness but seeing through it to the real hunger underneath, and offering more than I’ve trained myself to ask for.

The hard truth is that I was deserving of more than scraps even as that cold child at the window. Not because I’d earned it, but because no child deserves to be outside in the cold looking in. The theology that says we deserve nothing, that we’re all unworthy, gets weaponized against people who were genuinely wronged as if acknowledging the wrong done to you is spiritual pride. But there’s a difference between earning God’s grace (which none of us do) and being worth basic human warmth (which every child is). Conflating them keeps wounded people grateful for scraps when God is trying to seat them at the table.

People mean well when they say it could be worse.

And it’s true. It almost always could be worse. There were children colder than I was, hungrier, with no windows to even look into.

But “it could be worse” is true and useless in equal measure. It’s the kind of statement that’s unassailable and unhelpful at once. Accurate enough that you can’t argue with it, hollow enough that it offers nothing. It doesn’t warm the child at the window. It just shames him for being cold, as though the existence of greater suffering somewhere disqualifies his own.

This logic does real damage in the Christian walk.

It teaches us to suppress legitimate grief because someone, somewhere, grieves more. It turns the body of Christ, which Paul says should weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), into a hierarchy of suffering where only the worst-off have permission to hurt. It mistakes comparison for comfort.

Jesus never comforted anyone by telling them it could be worse. He wept at Lazarus’s tomb though He knew resurrection was coming (John 11:35). He didn’t tell Mary and Martha to buck up because other people had it harder. He entered the grief as grief, honored it as real, even knowing the fuller picture. The minimizing impulse that says “it could be worse” is foreign to how God actually meets us in pain.

But here’s where it gets complicated, where I have to turn the examination on myself.

The longing that began at those windows didn’t stay a child’s longing. It grew with me. And somewhere along the way, I began to suspect that the yearning itself had become something dangerous. Not the original wound, but my relationship to it.

Because a longing held long enough can become an idol. The ache for the warmth behind the glass can calcify into an identity built around lack, a self defined by what it’s outside of. And there is a strange, terrible comfort in that. The longing becomes familiar, almost companionable. You start to know yourself primarily as the one who yearns, and on some level you fear that satisfaction would dissolve you. That if you were finally let in, finally warm, finally fed, you wouldn’t know who you were anymore.

This is the trap I see swallow a lot of Christians, myself included. We can become so devoted to the longing that we miss the fulfillment, so attached to the posture of wanting that we can’t receive what we wanted. The Israelites in the wilderness longed for the Promised Land for forty years, and when scouts finally saw it, most of them were too afraid to enter (Numbers 13-14). The longing had become safer than the having.

Scripture warns repeatedly about the danger of the heart’s yearnings, not because longing is wrong, but because longing untethered will attach itself to anything. “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). The same hunger that could drive me toward God can drive me toward an endless circling of my own wound, worshipping the ache, building a shrine to the cold at the window and tending it faithfully my whole life.

The wrestling, then, is this: How do I honor the genuine wound, refuse the false comfort of “it could be worse,” reject the lie that I deserved only scraps, without enshrining the longing itself?

How do I let the hunger point me toward the God who fills it rather than letting the hunger become the thing I serve?

Lately I’ve started to wonder if the answer isn’t to stop longing but to redirect what the longing is for.

The child at the window wasn’t wrong to want warmth. I would argue the want was holy, even. It was the want of an image-bearer for the belonging she was made for. The error wasn’t in the longing but in believing it could only be satisfied by being let into that house, those people’s feast, that particular warmth behind that particular glass.

Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The longing I’ve carried since childhood was never actually for someone else’s Thanksgiving table. It was for the table I was genuinely made for, the feast that Scripture promises, the household that isn’t behind glass I’m forbidden to enter but is the very place God has been calling me into the whole time. The yearning was real and the yearning was right; I’d just attached it to the wrong fulfillment.

Revelation ends with a wedding feast (Revelation 19:9). The whole arc of Scripture bends toward gathering, toward the outsiders being brought in, toward the cold being warmed and the hungry being fed at a table that has room.

The longing at the window, it turns out, was prophecy of a kind: a hunger pointing toward a real feast, not a cruel reminder of one I’d never attend.

So I’m learning to hold the longing differently. Not to suppress it as ingratitude, not to enshrine it as identity, but to let it do what longing is for: to point me home. The cold was real. The exclusion was real. I was worth more than scraps. And the warmth I pressed my face against the glass to glimpse was a foretaste, not a taunt.

A hint of the table being prepared, where there is no glass, no lock, no outside, and the only ones still in the cold are the ones who, like me, are still learning to believe they’re allowed to come in.