Recently, I started reading a book entitled Broken Windows of the Soul. The authors, Arnold R. Fleagle and Donald A. Lichi, PhD, borrowed the idea from some research from Stanford University. Several years ago. Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo took two cars and parked, one on a street in affluent Palo Alto, CA, and the other in a sketchy neighborhood in the Bronx, NY. As part of the experiment, he removed the license plates and raised the hoods. And abandoned the cars to their fate.
Within 10 minutes, the car will be in the Bronx. Started losing parts. People were helping themselves to the parts of the vehicle. Within 24 hours, virtually everything of value had been stripped. Then, random destruction began until the entire car was trashed. In contrast, the car parked in upscale Palo Alto sat untouched for a week. Then the professor smashed one of the windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, it too was demolished.
Zimbardo developed what he became known as the Broken Windows Theory. His theory suggested that even minor disorders can have unintended consequences. The broken window was just the tipping point. After one of the windows was broken and left unattended, the entire car was soon trashed.
In the 1990s, New York City took on the experiment and tested the broken windows theory. The police chief selected two high-crime precincts and ordered the police to fix the broken windows and have a zero tolerance for crimes. They washed the subways of graffiti daily. They cleaned the street. They towed away abandoned cars. They arrested people for painting graffiti and jumping the turnstile to the subway. Arrests for misdemeanors soared. Arrests for major crime dropped dramatically. The neighborhoods became transformed. Every precinct showed double-digit decreases in crime.
Broken windows are a metaphor for the astonishing speed with which life can unravel. A single broken window soon attracts people who smash more windows. After all, breaking windows is fun. Isn't it? Pockets of disorder, graffiti, litter, etc. Communicated that authorities don’t care and will not enforce standards.
The concept of broken windows has critical spiritual applications. Paul says in Romans 3:23 that… “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” Let's be brutally honest. All of us have broken windows in our hearts and in our souls. The wisdom of this world simply tries to apply a band-aid to that wound, and it is never enough.
In our journey toward healing and wholeness, it is the availability of God’s love and his wisdom that guides. There is a wholeness that God wants to bring into each of our lives. God longs for the opportunity to repair the broken window of our souls. He wants to restore the lost remnants of personhood. Give a Peace beyond comparison. Gives us a wholeness and a purpose. The question becomes…
- Have you left any broken windows unrepaired in your life?
- Have you been guilty of allowing the litter of sin to remain like unwashed graffiti in your soul? Listen to what the apostle Paul writes… Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. – 2 Corinthians 5:17-19
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God Romans 3:23 (NIV)