I'm reading this book. Not because I want to. It's required. For school. (*can we pause here and please note that I'm so.over.school.) This book. It's filled with insultingly simple questions, and I find it mind-numbing.
Boundaries.
It's what the book is titled. Boundaries, that cliche Christian book on emotional health, promises to teach readers "when to say yes, when to say no, and how to take control of your life." My copy has an image of a white picket fence with a heart shaped hole in its gate, but Amazon shows me a low rock wall instead. The wall is downright quaint. It separates green grass from more green grass from a beautiful blue sky. Boundaries.
The happy freedom of the Christian life can be mine if I only build a low, sturdy wall around the beating center of my heart.
At a mandatory 10:20 chapel, I get a text message. It's vague, but I know what it means.
She has cancer.
"Boundaries help keep the good in and the bad out", write Cloud and Townsend on page 31 of Boundaries. I try to catch my breath, as I feel my insides dissolving and attempting to rebuild. I feel the impact again and again.
"Boundaries help us distinguish our property so that we can take care of it," the book continues. And it occurs to me in an instant that evil doesn't care one little bit about your pretty brick walls, your property. Sometimes darkness and pain just crashes into you, and your patch of perfectly maintained interior landscape is scorched in the resulting brushfire of grief.
It's been one year since I got that text message. and in it's wake, I've got a handful more just like it. I'm thinking today about all that I have built around myself.
Therapists love to talk about saying no, about self-care, about creating a kind of sustainability for your own soul.
and all of that is great. really. don't get me wrong.
But as I walk to the edge of my gated heart today to remember all that the last year has held, I wonder about these "boundaries" I have built. Are they really about health, or are they about comfort? In my effort to be well, have I insulated myself from the sharp grief of the world? Have I missed out on opportunities to love well in the name of "protecting myself"? It all just sounds so selfish.
So much of the way we interact with others in their grief, or suffering, or even just stress... is ritualistic. We bow our heads to say a quick prayer. We send a text offering to help, knowing that most likely the answer will be a "thanks, but no thanks." We make a meal and drop it off. We write checks or stuff bags full of clothes. We put a dollar in a can for a disabled veteran, or we just don't say anything at all. And then we promptly forget all about it.
In becoming our heart's own gatekeepers, choosing what is "good" and what is "bad", what to let in and what to keep out, I think we might have missed the point.
It is, after all, the hard things that make us softer. More full of grace. More like Jesus. The things that we are so determined to keep out- the pain and stress and grief of other people's lives- those are the things that Jesus lets all the way in.
So maybe the best way to honor the brave women in my world is to step out from behind my walled-in heart. Maybe I can honor them by being brave enough to enter someone else's turmoil and be present.
Grief, after all, is grief. Stress, after all, is stress. Frustration, after all, is frustration. No matter the magnitude or the news coverage or the shock value. Pain is pain. The world is cruel and hard and ambivalent towards our efforts to protect ourselves, and maybe the bravest thing we can do is walk into someone else's struggling heart and just stay.
And the thing is? There's a good chance you'll feel useless. Like there's nothing you can do, so why should you be there at all? Don't worry. That means you're in the right place. Sit down. You don't have to say anything at all. Set out the dinner, but don't force her to eat. Pack away the leftovers with care. Stay until the house is quiet and the lights have dimmed. Stay through your own discomfort and your own pain and your own awkwardness. Stay despite your busy. Leave only when it's time to go.
This is how we change a culture steeped in messy: by climbing over the low, brick walls of our own boundaries and into each other's story. We change culture by saying yes when it would be easier, more comfortable, less time-consuming to say no.
We hoist our lanterns and walk humbly. We move one step at a time across the surface of a fire-scorched world, arms open wide, hearts beating loud and unprotected in our chests.
To those who have held the lantern for me, and refused to leave until it was time to go: thank you.
And to those riddled with grief, riddled with pain, riddled with heartache, it is my privilege and joy to hold the lantern for you.
Wishing you a week of torn down walls and authenticity.
