Of all the places where the needs for boundaries exists, there is at the same junction a powerful urge to tear down fences. This is only a disconcerting thing when we don’t understand which fences need to come down, and which must remain. Arbitrary divisions should not stand; separation based on color, doctrine, gender, age, weight, ethnicity, maturity… these fences must be pulled down. The ground-swelling forces of love must surge and spill the upper boulders in the sun, and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
It is not a hellish thing, these walls. Conversely, these walls are a gift of one to the other, and back again. Hell is, indeed, where there are no walls. It is a place where there is nothing to escape to nor escape from. These concepts are mute in the face of an absence of boundaries, of walls. Hell has no walls. No individuality exists there. Nothing that mirrors the uniqueness of the Creator has any purchase in Hell. Conformity, dissolution, and the absence of person is the stuff of Hell.
Yet we must never forget that there are fences ordained before time, set in place by the Keeper of the lands. These walls are our protection, our privacy, our personhood. They define who we are in a great many ways by defining what we are not. They reveal our individual distinctiveness. They maintain our uniqueness. We are each one of us separate from any other, single dancers in a wonderful choreography of life, moving in and out of the dance, participating then resting, like the ebb and flow of the tide. In the keeping of boundaries we honor the uniqueness of each other… we honor the One who made us, and the One who redeems us from the ravages of ineffective walls:
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
Click Follow to receive emails when this author adds content on Bublish
Comment on this Bubble
Your comment and a link to this bubble will also appear in your Facebook feed.