One day, while I was walking Tank… okay, one of the many times per day that I walk Tank, we decided to see how far down a certain street went.  We were used to finding roads that ended in other roads.  We have even found the occasional dead end and gone down to see what was so terrible that they just stopped making street.  We had never encountered a dead end like this.

The Boundary at the end of The Road.

This street terminated in a wall with bars and a gate.  It used to go through into another neighborhood but something happened.  You see, I live in a neighborhood that has gone through a lot of transition.  It had been THE neighborhood at one point many years ago.  It was so good and affluent that other neighborhoods built on to it because they wanted to be like it.  As with all big ups, my neighborhood experienced a down. People built cheap housing and property values dropped, so did the quality of the inhabitants.  Things got so bad, they let me live there.

A neighborhood to the north of ours which had been very happy to be attached to us at first, started to feel some reluctance at the association.  Cars were coming out of our neighborhood at high speeds, at all hours, stereos blaring vulgarities at ungodly volumes, often with law enforcement in pursuit.  Actually it was not much of a surprise that people didn’t want that spilling over onto the streets where they lived.  So, at the end of this street, they built a wall.

This was no ordinary wall, though.  They made it pretty.  They also put in a gate with a combination lock – the purpose being to not totally exclude communication between the two neighborhoods.  Anyone who had business going from one community to the other could gain access by means of the gate.  It was a way to close off the bad, but still allow the good.  It was a boundary.

Mastery of boundaries is the secret to most successful lives.  They are the only way to protect things worth protecting while still allowing us access to the rest of the world.  The Temple in Jerusalem had VERY clear boundaries, because there were VERY big consequences for violating those boundaries.

Should we, as Christians have boundaries? Yes.

…oh, more, sorry.

Remember that Boundaries are designed to keep certain things from influencing us while occasionally allowing us to influence them.  As Christians, we are called to influence the world, but not allow it to influence us.  As parents, you are called to influence your children and to keep them from being influenced by harmful things.  As a spouse, I’m called to have a positive influence on my marriage, while diligently defending the boundaries so as to refuse admittance to anything destructive.

So how should we use boundaries?    God always uses boundaries to protect one or both parties.  In the Garden of Eden, God had only one boundary and it was around the one thing that would destroy the relationship between God and man.  When that boundary was crossed, a ton of others went up.  You ever wonder about the whole “don’t eat pork” dietary thing for the Jews?  A lot of the laws concerning diet would have seemed crazy to other people of the day.  They tended to forbid the easiest practices and put restrictions on how much could be harvested and then they had rules about giving the best of your harvest to God.  The “no pork” thing is a prime example of this. Pigs are actually a lot easier to raise than most of the clean animals.  All of the communities around Israel would raise them, eat them and run them through the streets which meant that those communities would be entirely unclean for a Jew to live in.  In other words, part of the reason for those restrictions was so the Jews would have to stay among their own people and have faith that God would provide for them since it looked like He had taken away a lot of the easiest practices of the day.

Think about the Temple.  The different courts surrounding the Temple were there  for so many reasons.  They kept people from entering places they were not allowed and thus from incurring wrath.  For instance, the court of the Gentiles kept the gentiles from getting mixed in with the assembly.  This would make the assembly unclean and could get the gentile judged by God for the infiltration, or be subjected to judgment meant only for Jews, because the gentile was not where he was supposed to be.

The courts kept the Temple services from becoming disorganized by limiting the areas people could move into.

The courts also protected people.  One of the many reasons there was a Court of the Women was because even in those days, men’s hands were untrustworthy things.  Remember that in a lot of the surrounding cultures, female participation at their temples could be limited to prostitution or birthing children for sacrifice.

We need to use boundaries in these same ways.  We need to protect the vulnerable areas of our lives.  We need to take care to keep things that need to be separated from being thrown together (sacred from common, intimate from public, this isn’t a klan meeting).  We also need to remember that when we have to put someone outside a boundary, that we also make a way for them to come back and clear guidelines for how that would happen.  The example God gives us is that when we were placed out of the point of intimacy with Him, there was only one way back but it would be through a sacrifice that none of us were worthy to give.  So He also provided that sacrifice in the form of His son and made Him the narrow gate by which we could return to the Father.  At the death of Jesus, the boundary that most closely surrounded the presence of God – a curtain as thick as a phone book – was ripped from the top to the bottom.  This boundary protected our sinful selves from entering into the presence of a righteous God and being destroyed in the transaction.  God wants no boundaries between us and was apparently as ready for this boundary to go as we were.
That’s pretty good to know.  Also a great example to follow.

Terrors into Teddy Bears

by Keith D Troop

10/25/11

I have done bad things. I have had bad things done to me. These things are some of the most horrific wounds that I will experience, though I’m sure that the future may yet over match. I’ve worn these wounds as scars that have affected my behaviors and perceptions across the course of my life. They have shaped my image of God and my image of self. Some of these wonderful gifts revisit me at the most inopportune moments causing me bowel wrenching, mind freezing terrors from which I may need days to recover.

Some things that I have seen keep me from seeking sleep and others have made me wish for the eternal sleep that my earthly mind may not be troubled with them anymore. In truth, there have been many times when the contemplation of remembering what has gone before has been enough to put either a gun or a bottle in my mouth. Fortunately, the bottle usually kept me too uncoordinated to work the gun.

The more that I guarded and protected these things, the more they festered in me. They began a process of moral and spiritual corruption in me that I became powerless to halt. Had not God intervened, I would have died from the activity of prior events, some of which were decades in my past.

I was wounded and scared and scarred and battered. My terrified self had lost ability to function under the weight of my own wounds and fears. They were mine and the more they became mine the more I became mine and the more I became mine the less I allowed God to have me. That spiral continued until I became deceived into thinking that I was entirely my own and in that place even my blessings became curses. Let alone those things that all men would see as curses in my life, those things became intolerable.

Praise be to God that one day He reminded me that I was not my own, that I had been bought with a price. Praise be to God that if I am not my own then neither are my blessings. Praise be to God that if my blessings are not my own, then neither are my curses. Praise be to God that if my curses are God’s then they are His to do with and to use both in my life and in the life of others.

So it was one day as I sat in place full of wounded souls, amidst the cries of pain and anguish I heard a wound that was familiar to me. I knew the same woundedness that this person felt. I knew the depth of the pain that they experienced. I had experienced it also, with all the rawness and hideous agony. But what to do with that in my own life? I still didn’t know the answer to that. So I moved close to the hurting person and shortly we began to speak.

After listening to them, I thought that maybe I should share with them my pain. How to do that was a mystery to me though. My pain was still so very painful. Should my wounds have been physical then I’m sure that I would have been the very epitome of gore. An x-rated image in what I perceived to be a g-rated world. To even speak of such a horror would feel like unleashing a fiend in a kindergarten. Like introducing Freddy Kruger among the Care Bears.

Still, to hear their wounds was to hear their isolation. To know their pain was to know their separation. If I could understand their feelings from their words, then perhaps I could ease their solitude with mine. If they felt a pain similar to mine then they most probably felt the horror of that pain just as I did.

Perhaps, just maybe, if I advanced some of my own horror, then their horror would seem less horrific. It was worth a try. So I dug into the dark recesses of my soul, where I kept the unspeakably hidden things of my life. There I grabbed a small handful of the offal that made up my experiences and slowly advanced it towards this other. It was there that the magic occurred. It was there that something beyond myself came forth.

As I reached forward this handful of gore and pain, it transformed on the way to this other person. It became something else in that moment of transfer. The rotten, disease-ridden, pieces of me that left my hand became shiny beautiful treasures as they were taken up by this other. Where horror landed, flowers sprung and bloomed and the emptiness within me flowed forth a well spring of comfort for this other. My tears became their smiles. My fears became their strengths. My sins showed forth their righteousness. My dead places became places of life for this other.

A bridge of horrific things was used to break the solitude for us both. By reaching forward with this terror from my soul, I became a hand this person could see. I became a light for them in the dark place. They reached back with the woundedness they had and together we comforted each other. By sharing our pains, God transformed them as they spent a moment in the heart of the other and then were returned to us. Now my terror had become a teddy-bear, not just for this other, but for me as well.

I am not my own, I have been bought with a price. I am God’s glorious inheritance.  I am both His treasure and at the same time, a storehouse for His blessings. My error was in thinking that all the blessings He stored within me, would look like blessings while still in their wrapper. It was only when I unwrapped them, that I was able to see them as He sees them and understand them as He intended. It was my error to think that all the blessings He stored in me were there merely for me and my betterment.