Walls are everywhere. Surrounding cities, making up buildings, and around our hearts. While the walls we build protect us, they also keep people out. They are designed to keep what is most precious, safe. However, walls and the World Race were not meant to co-exist.
This month my team and team Metamorphosis worked with a local pastor near Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala. He is an amazing man of God who has the vision of creating a prayer chapel/conference center on this piece of land that he just purchased last year. The “building” has already been started, however, the construction is a few years old and one of the walls has shifted. While working with him we worked on breaking down that wall as well as weeding the property, making a road, and digging holes for posts for the new property fence. Our teams had to work together using cement posts to break down the wall that was built wrong. The wall wouldn’t have been effective in protecting the people inside because it wasn’t built right.
The same is true with the walls around our hearts. If built the right way and only protecting us from the right things, walls around our heart can protect us. However, most of our walls only shut everyone out, including those closest to us. Our relationship with other people are only going to be as deep as the walls allow, typically leading to shallow friendships based off of half-truths. Breaking down those walls that protect our hearts are painful, but it is the only way to truly live in harmonious community with others.
The first three full days in Guatemala were finished with squad sessions. We deemed these sessions “The Secret Sessions.” We took turns telling our secrets to the rest of the squad. They could be past things that you have done to someone, what someone has done to you, or something you struggle with. Needless to say, when you have to lay your soul bare and tell people who you have only met a couple of times things that you have never told anyone, you start breaking down walls.
And the walls came down.
Not only did we knock down the walls at our ministry site, we knocked down the walls of our heart. The walls that had been built up to thirty years before came tumbling down. We sat in front of each other exposing ourselves bare. Things that we had never told our parents, our friends, or the ones who had hurt us. And then the changes came. We prayed for each other: for the hurt, the struggle, years that were lost. All of it. We found out that we weren’t alone. We were shown examples of people who had not only survived, but had thrived. We realized that so could we.
We learned that we don’t need the walls. We don’t need to hide. We can love without the walls to attempt to protect us. Because the walls around our heart don’t protects us. They prevent us from fully stepping into the community that God has planned for us.
Some extra goodies:
We left Quiché this morning and arrived in Antigua this afternoon. We will arrive in Tegucigalpa tomorrow night some time to start month TWO!!
Dios te bendiga,
Elizabeth
