As I was telling someone about the World Race the other day, I found myself explaining the emphasis on vulnerability and accountability that so many alumni have experienced with their teammates on the race. After mentioning this, I caught myself saying
“I don’t know, I feel like I’ve been slowly building this wall….so I don’t know how open I’ll be with people I haven’t met in person yet.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d caught myself talking about the walls I’ve been building up lately, but this time it definitely got me thinking. Why is it that humans both crave and fear being fully known? And furthermore why was I so comfortable with building up these “walls” that I was almost flaunting it to people, as if keeping myself fully guarded made me more wise or more mysterious. As if being jaded were an attractive or even acceptable quality.
We put up emotional “walls” when we are afraid of making ourselves vulnerable. In friendships, as leaders, as followers, and in romantic relationships. We build these walls out fear of being hurt, rejected, misunderstood, or abandoned…out of our own insecurities, our past hurts, our secrets and our sadness.
While emotional walls may make us feel less vulnerable to the things we are afraid of, the truth of the matter is that they are ungodly. The message we send to God when we build emotional walls is that we place our trust (or lack there of) in people, and not in Him.
We make a million excuses and justifications for putting up emotional walls:
“People won’t understand”
“People will judge me”
“I’m just not the kind of person that needs to broadcast my past or my problems”
“I’m just guarding my heart”
Don’t get me wrong: guarding your heart is biblical. Trust is built over time, relationships are deepened over time. I’m not promoting you go share your testimony with random people, or talk to strangers about what you’re struggling with. However, God makes it clear in his word that we were created for deep relationship.
My favorite word in Hebrew is yada. It means to fully know. The origin of the word is “root”. This word is frequently used in scripture to describe God’s relationship with us: He fully knows us, down to our roots. Our secrets, our sins, our hurts, our pride. He also uses it to describe the relationship between Adam and Eve before the fall. Yada. We were made to know one another deeply and fully. To see other people and to be seen. We crave this. When we don’t have this, we feel lonely. We were created for deep relationship. To be fully known and fully loved.
The result of emotional walls is shallow relationship.
The result of emotional walls is relationship where people see bits and pieces of you, but cannot fully know you, and therefore cannot fully love you. When you build walls, you rob yourself of being known, seen and loved. However, you also rob those around you of their calling to know, to see, and to love unconditionally in the manner that Jesus Christ does. You are disabling those around you from honoring the Lord in their relationship with you.
If we do truly put our trust in the Lord, and not in man, we have nothing to fear in sharing ourselves, our story, our struggles and our joys with those around us.
My challenge to you is that if you are in the process of putting up walls: stop building.
Take everything you were building that wall with, your fear, your regret, things you aren’t proud of, past hurts, pessimism of fellow man….and lay them at the feet of Jesus. You don’t need them for the calling he has given you.
Psalm 118:8 “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.”
So often, trusting in the Lord means sharing what He has done in your life, and is currently doing, with others. It is his story, his work.
As for me, this is something that I will need to desperately cling to in this next chapter of life, as I build new relationships, and let new people know and love me. I need to shed the walls that I’ve been building and take pride in weakness and vulnerability in order to be more like Christ.
