I painted the youth room yesterday at the church we’re staying at. I see a correlation in my years of youth work between youth ministry and constant painting projects. Common hypothesis… if you color walls, teenagers will come.
One wall, two wall, red wall, blue wall.
Walls are very important here because people spend lots of time inside from cold, rainy, windy weather in N. Ireland. I mean it’s hard to believe its summer when I never go outside without a decent jacket on. It could also be the one day a week the sun comes out but it only lasts a couple hours before a rain storm rolls through. Walls are necessary in keeping the foul elements outside where they belong.
There’s a difference though between the blue walls I painted and the sight looking off a cliff into the Irish Sea. I can paint a wall and hang a picture on it but there’s no comparison to the amount of beauty I’ve seen viewing the green rolling hills crashing into deep blue waves. Which brings me to the point I’m trying to get at… life is found outside of walls – a place you can see God’s creation and form real relationships.
Let’s talk about people. Just like weather, people can be cold, bitter and down right nasty. Because of this we all have walls (barriers if you wish) we put up that shields our true emotions and passions. We don’t dare go outside our personal walls in those kinds of elements. Some of us actually have gotten quite comfortable inside our walls (maybe painted them and added some décor) to a point we don’t see any reason to leave them. So we live our lives inside our walls (bubble is you wish) never letting anyone know who we really are and never knowing who anyone else truly is.
I believe just like risking the adventure of experiencing Ireland’s beautiful shoreline, its worth going outside your personal walls and allow people to love you for who you really are. Painted walls are just a poor representation of what beauty can be, measured to grand scale of how God designed the world. My time spent on the Irish coast cost getting soaked in the middle of a heavy rain storm. In the same way, sacrificing your walls means feelings are going to get hurt and conflict will happen, but at the end of the day (and storms) God gives us rainbows as a sign that there’s a hope for a better next day. So instead of decorating your walls…. knock them down.
“Footnote”A couple days ago a friend of mine took me around Belfast, showing me some of the sites. A block away from his apartment we stopped in the middle of the road. There, built right across the road was a huge brick wall blocking thru traffic. I was then told this wall was built because one side is a Protestant neighborhood and the other side is Catholic. I don’t know how many years this wall has been there but it saddens me when the consequence of people too closed off to reconcile differences is lifeless brick slabs separating them. This is a prime example of people living inside their own walls.
