Fence Building

Why are boundaries so hard to keep? Because people get flustered when you do. As if there has been no precedent or forethought that setting one may be the more appropriate action to take. What is worse, I get flustered when I try to erect them. Having to put up a fence on your own land is never what you want to spend time doing, nor does it uphold the vision of free-ranging expanse. Just let me be. But it is a protective measure, because vulnerability could be the death of me. Ah-ha! Now we've pinned it.

Vulnerability is double-faced. On one hand, as someone who believes in Someone, I have to be open, honest and staking out my claim to truth. Boring holes, displacing dirt, drilling posts, stringing chicken wire. On the other hand, I am to take refuge, reject self-sufficiency, lean not on the understanding that comes from me, myself and I.

So what am I to do? Lean so heavily that I fall, find myself prostrate, face down. Let my Defender do his job. And then what? Utter in order to adopt the fact that I have been set free to live in freedom. Upon persistence, a second dinner invitation, I can fence myself in with confidence. This is my pre-paid liberty. It's a trickily tight rope to walk across. I was shaky, delivered it poorly, hardly held on, but I made it to the other side. Respect, though it has dissolved and fizzled out of human relation, is something I choose to cling to. Therefore, just as I was declared respectable enough by the Craftsman to be made into something new while I was still splintery (I have written all about these splinters before), so too do His other creations deserve to be utilized similarly. It is a labor of love.

Can I then see this conversation as ground breaking? It is so easy to yell my gossip to eager ears, "NEWS, NEWS, read all about it!"Or in my language community, "Guess what he/she did!!!" Instead, this beat-down principle, respect, that underlies the greatest display of it in all human history, the Cross, perhaps penetrated that disgruntled response of his. I do not expect astonishment. I shut him down, I told him no, I am taken, claimed, accounted for, loved. The first time I saw the Great Gesture truly defended, it was no eye-catching moment for me either. It too came to me in the form of rejection; and quite a bit more devastating, I might add (take a look back at 2009).

But I can pause and recall this little victory dance we call "assurance." It, this snippet of a conversation, this claim to the way of Christ, was not in vain.

"Help me to see

that it is faith stirred by grace that does the deed,

that faith brings a man nearer to thee, 

raising him above mere man."