Painted Window Trilogy

Book One:  Painted Window

Overview

Finding that one, true love has been the pursuit of all mankind since the Garden of Eden.  Both Adam and Eve were searching for more; they were sure there was more.  The allure from Satan was that God wasn’t enough.  The temptation was that there was something out there that would make them happier and more complete than their Father.  It was and still is a lie.

However, I believe we were created purposefully by God to long for more than this world has to offer.  As His children, this is not our home, and consequently, it cannot bring us the satisfaction and joy we desire, and neither can anyone in this world.  Additionally, we were created to give and receive love.  Everything in our natures wants to be loved, to be adored, to be treasured.  Many may claim that they don’t need these things, but they are deceiving themselves.  All people, men and women alike, long to be loved perfectly.

God created us this way purposefully and then gave us His Son, Jesus Christ, as the Lover of our souls.  Christ is our Bridegroom and we, His bride.  Over and over in Scripture God uses this analogy to describe the love relationship between our Savior and His people.  This analogy is appropriate because in our human senses, the marriage relationship between a man and a woman is the closest thing we can imagine to the intimate nature of Christ’s love for us.  And even that is inadequate.

So God chose you, each of you, from before the foundations of time, to be the bride of Christ, to be adored and loved and sacrificed for and treasured for all eternity.  God says our relationships are personal ones, intimate ones, and the moment we say “I do” to the promises and relationship with Christ, that love is ours.  It was destined to be ours before that even, but we can live in that knowledge when we accept Him finally as our Savior.

Why, then, do we continually look to this world to give us the love and joy we already have?  Why do we believe the lie that happiness is here, in this time and in this place?  Why do we look to other people to love us perfectly, accept us completely, treasure us forever? 

The sadness that encompassed my life for so long and encompasses so many others’ lives now was being the recipient of perfect love from the King of the universe, of being adored and treasured and intimately loved by the Lord of lords and the King of kings and yet living in the here and now in misery and pain.  The inexplicable reality for so many believers is that they already have what they seek, but they still seek it in places that will never be able to deliver.

It’s like being in the middle of the Sahara Desert, dying of thirst.  There is a cup of cool, clean water right there within arm’s reach, but instead of reaching for that cup of life-saving water, we suck on the sand around us, thinking that if we just keep trying different parts of the sand, our thirst will be quenched.

When my life of sin finally came crashing down around me so many years ago, I had a succession one night of two dreams.  Please know that I am not promoting dream interpretation or visions or anything like that, but I do believe that God will speak to us in whatever way He decides.  At this moment, God spoke to me in two dreams.  This was the moment that I finally saw the truth about how I was loved and how I had been looking to this world instead of to Him.

In my first dream I was standing in a doorway and every person who I perceived as having loved me during my life passed before me.  One after another they walked past, but no one stopped.  I wanted them to stop.  I longed for one of them to stop and show me the love I wanted so badly, but each of them simply walked by the open doorway.  By the end of the dream I was left sadder than I was at the beginning, broken and alone, feeling absolutely unloved.  I woke up then and cried like I had never cried before.

You see, I had already come to the end of what I like to call my “sin rope,” and I had given my life back to God.  I was seeking Him and what I perceived was His will in my life, but I was still not happy.  I had given up other men and drinking and every other thing that had been my loves of choice, but my heart was still broken.  I couldn’t stop feeling desperately and completely alone.  So when I woke up from this dream where it was painfully obvious that not one person from whom I had sought love was really giving it to me, I was in despair.

“Why would You show me that?” I screamed at the ceiling.  “Why would you show me that I was never really loved?”  I wanted answers from God.  I wanted to know why He would bring me even further into despair when I thought I had given up to Him.  Eventually I cried myself back to sleep.

Then I had a second dream, although it wasn’t really a dream, per se’.  This one was more like a vision, a sense of things, if you will.  This time I simply knew I was in a warm light, comforted and serene in a way I had never known before.  I felt secure and treasured and completely loved.  This dream/vision lasted about 20 minutes and I awoke again, but this time my cries to the ceiling were a little different.

“That’s what I want!” I cried.  “Please just tell me what to do so that I can feel that!”  I was sobbing in desperation again.  I knew immediately that this love was what I had been looking for all of my life and I wanted it more than anything.

In the midst of my tears I heard these words ringing in my head:  “Deb, this is the way that I love you, that I have always loved you.  See my love.”

Finally it was like this light dawned on me that what I had been looking so hard for in all of my life had been right there all along.  I simply had to see it. 

Now, understand that this seeing doesn’t happen overnight.  As a matter of fact, it’s a life-long process of peeling back the layers of deception and lies so that you get little glimpses of how great a love we have received.  Eventually, as I studied more and more, I began to realize the way God has described this love in His Word is intimate—it’s the intimate love as between a man and a woman in marriage.  Then as I looked more and more at that, it dawned on me that there is one book in the Bible that deals specifically with this kind of love:  The Song of Solomon.

This book in the Bible is a beautiful love story between Solomon and one of his wives, the Shulamite woman, but surely if God chose to put it in His Word, it must also point to Christ.  And it does.  Though a story of a man a woman, a bride and groom, the Song of Solomon points to the greater and more significant relationship between Christ and us, His bride. 

We often stop, however, at the human story because it seems too intimate to be about our relationship to our Savior.  But intimacy isn’t limited to purely physical or even emotional connections.  The dictionary definition of “intimacy” is:

“Characterized or involving close, personal knowledge of another; sharing a relationship of an emotionally personal nature.” (dictionary.com)

Who is more intimately aware of us than our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?  And in that intimacy, He has pledged His love for us in every way possible.  To put it in human terms, Jesus is intimately and completely in love with you, His bride. 

The picture God gives us of this relationship is in the absolute love and emotional connection of Solomon and the Shulamite woman.  It’s the closest thing we might understand, and still we really can’t fathom it.  This is the love you already have, if you are a believer, and the sadness is that very few even see glimpses of it, much less know that it is there.

After realizing this, even in such a limited sense, I wanted to convey it to other women, so that’s when I taught a series entitled,“Christ, the Eternal Bridegroom” on the Song of Solomon.  That seemed to help, but I knew I still needed more.  I needed to find some illustration that would resonate truth to the hurting women I met every day.

Finally I told a story that compared each of us to a peasant woman who was loved completely by the king of the land, but because she couldn’t get past her own stained soul and his position as king, she couldn’t accept this love.  Her inability to accept it didn’t change it—he loved her completely, but from afar.  The sadness was that she lived all of her life as a pauper, deeply saddened and always incomplete when all that she longed for and needed was right there.

Enter Elizabeth and the allegory, Painted Window.

I wrote this book as a symbolic representation of the struggle we all have with accepting the intimate and complete love of the King of kings.  We can see that He loves us as His people and as His church, but to know and understand that He loves each of us, individually, intimately and fully is difficult.  I know that we won’t see it fully until the marriage supper when our Bridegroom comes for us, but until then I believe that is why the Song of Solomon is in the Bible—to give us a glimpse of this love.

Painted Window is an allegory, so it’s written a lot like any fictional novel.  However, the storyline and the characters represent more than their fictional manifestations.  Elizabeth is meant to encapsulate all of us at one time or another.  Though our situations may be very different from hers and also our sins, the struggle is the same:  knowing and accepting the love of the King.  Reginald, of course, is representative of Jesus, though the representation is limited in that he is human.  The other characters and situations are meant to represent other times and places in our journeys, prayerfully speaking to us along the way.

It is divided into 8 sections with approximately 20-30 pages per section.  Each section then ends with a Bible study that is divided into 3 sections:  “Into the Allegory,” “Into the Word,” and “Into the Song.”  There is a specific message about our journeys in each section and the questions are designed to lead you to discovering these messages. 

We, just like Elizabeth, just like the woman caught in adultery from John 8, just like David from Psalm 51, and just like the Shulamite woman who said in Song of Solomon 1:6,

            Do not gaze at me because I am dark.

Just like them we must come to the realization that although our sins are real and they deserve every horrible thing the Law says, Jesus Christ, our Savior and the Lover of our souls, said, “No.  I choose her.  I will die for her.”

Jesus says, as Solomon said in the Song of Solomon 1:15 to the Shulamite woman who doesn’t even want him to look at her because she is dark,

            Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold, you are beautiful.

These words are why I wrote Painted Window.

                                               

Painted Window is available for purchase through amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, crossbooks.com, or by visiting Love Everlasting Ministries and contacting Dr. Waterbury directly.  Additionally, Dr. Waterbury has taught through this series and the videos are available on the Love Everlasting Ministries Facebook page or on Vimeo.