Walls

I’ve had the opportunity to work in the construction business. When building a house, the walls are easy to construct. They’re laid out on the sub-floor, the bottom and top plates marked for the studs, and then the studs are nailed in place. A whole exterior wall can be made on a flat surface like that, and when completed it’s simply raised up, put in place, braced, and nailed to the decking. On to the next wall, and before you know it the four exterior walls are completed and all attached. The interior walls, for the rooms, come next and follow the same process. The walls are, in a sense, barriers or borders.

When we get down to it, whether we are builders or not, we’ve all built walls haven’t we? The walls we’ve built aren’t built with wood or bricks however. They’re built with will and determination, and sometimes guilt and shame. They’re the walls we build within us, around our hearts. While others can’t physically see the walls we’ve built, they often know they are there. Here are some thoughts on the walls we build:

·         We build strong walls around that place within us where we keep hidden all of our darkest secrets about ourselves—the ones we want no one else to know about.

·         We build walls around our emotions because we don’t want to appear “soft” or “unmanly.”

·         We build walls around our past, much like junkyards have fences around them, to hide the debris.

·         We build walls around the “real” us, the part of us we don’t want our church friends to see or know about.

While our walls are fairly easy to build, there is one wall that is particularly easy to build. It’s the wall around all of our other walls; the one that we hope protects those other walls from being seen. It’s called our phony selves, the show we put on for all others to show them how “normal” we are. God knows all about our walls because He sees right through them. And He knows that the more transparent we are with Him, the less we will need any of those other walls. And if He is our foundation, there is no need for any walls.

Bottom Line Thought: How can you go about tearing down some of your walls?