In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson offers the following illustration adapted from Karl Barth to demonstrate the powerful possibilities in spiritual reading of God’s word.
Imagine a group of men and women in huge warehouse. They were born in this warehouse, grew up in it, and have everything there for their needs and comfort. There are no exits to the building but there are windows. But the windows are thick with dust, are never cleaned, and so no one bothers to look out. Why would they? The warehouse is everything they know, has everything they need. But then one day one of the children drags a stepstool under one of the windows, scrapes off the grime, and looks out. He sees people walking on the streets; he calls to his friends to come and look. They crowd around the window -they never knew a world existed outside their warehouse. And then they notice a person out in the street looking up and pointing; soon several people are gathered looking up and talking excitedly. The children look up but there nothing to see but the roof of their warehouse. They finally get tired, watching these people out on the street acting crazily, pointing up nothing and getting excited about it. What’s the point of stopping for no reason at all, pointing at nothing at all, and talking up a storm about the nothing?
But what those people in the street were looking at was an airplane (or geese in flight, or a gigantic pile of cumulus clouds). The peopIe in the street look up and see the heavens and everything in the heavens. The warehouse people have no heavens above them, just roof.
What would happen, though, if one day one of those kids cut a door out of the warehouse, coaxed his friends out, and discovered the immense sky above them and the grand horizons beyond them? That is what happens, writes Barth, when we open the Bible -we enter the totally unfamiliar world of God, a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond us. Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this.
Typically, adults in the warehouse scoff at the tales the children bring back. After all they are completely in control of the warehouse world in ways they could never be outside. And they want to keep it that way.
The illustration stirred me deeply. In the warehouse I see church as I experienced it. I, like the kid who cuts a door out of the warehouse, have discovered “immense sky above and grand horizons beyond “; “a world of creation and salvation stretching endlessly above and beyond”. I have moved from the warehouse to the shack.