Brown bricks, stack em high, stack em wide. Build, build, build. Smear the grey cement and slab it on thick. Place it on top of the previous one, building on what’s already there. How high can you build? How strong can you make your wall? Build, build, build.
How high is high enough? However high you can make it go. If you build it high enough, maybe just maybe no one will be able to climb over it. And they can’t tear it down because it’s built on a foundation. A foundation of isolation, a foundation of hidden feelings and suppressed emotions.
We shout to the voices over the wall. maybe even peek through the cracks. Just a glimpse though. Just enough to see their face and hear their voice, before patching up the crack.
They want to ruin the wall you worked so hard to build. Don’t let them in, don’t let them in, don’t let them in. They will kick down your well constructed wall; they will open your doors for all the feelings you suppressed. But the worst of all? You will be forced into feeling again. You will have to make yourself available toward the possibility of hurt and rejection. But if you keep the wall up, you won’t need to worry about those feelings.
I can determine how much I give you and how much I get. I get to decide how much I share, how much I listen to you and let you in. The thing with the wall is you can take a few bricks down whenever you feel. You benefit from the other person on the side of the wall until it’s convenient for you. Then you become the builder again, stacking your bricks even higher than the last time.
Baring your soul isn’t an easy thing to do, but it is the way we’re called to live. When this realization hits, you understand that the wall needs to come down. Chip, chip, chip. It pierces you as you chip away the cement layered between the bricks. You come to find out that as the cement is chipped away, pain starts to surface. The tendency would be to build the wall right back up again, because you never signed up for pain. But pain, when it festers for so long, becomes numb. Feeling becomes numb and it feels safer that way. When the wall is being knocked down, pain feels fresh. It feels like a fresh wound, inflicted with pain, raw and open. You hear a voice, “Let it sting, let it sting.” For the first time, you let the realization of the pain you hid away for so long, surface. You let yourself feel, every ounce of hurt, pain and rejection. Chains of numbness are broken off. There’s something bubbling up inside of you, and before you know it, it’s flooding out, as tears pour over the brim of your eyes.
You let God’s tender, yet fierce love, pour over you like liquid fire. You let His compassion for you fill all the areas where you felt unsafe and rejected. You let yourself be encountered by His beautiful embrace, as you feel truth of who you are and your identity replace all the lies you’ve believed.
You look up and you see the walls start to fall down in front of your eyes. The foundation that you’ve spent years constructing is crumbling into little pieces. It’s comical really. You thought you built it really well, yet the Master Builder started to knock it down in a matter of seconds. Crumble, crumble, crumble. Let it fall, let it fall. And the wildest thing starts to happen. The people you kept out for so long start to come forward, and for the first time you let them come close, because fear, failure and rejection don’t play a role in your life anymore. The wall no longer exists, it lies in a crumble of what is a story of redemption. A story of love.
theres life in the desert 