We perceive the world around us through a particular lens, one that we uniquely craft for ourselves based on our past life experiences.
Sometimes, our past life experiences cause us to build walls up around ourselves, blocking out the outside world, relationships and people of any kind. We take on a mentality of rejection, which causes us to shut down and put the walls up even higher so we feel protected and safe from the hurt other people might cause us. But, it’s pretty hard to live life with your walls up all the time. Makes it difficult to see what’s going on around you. Makes creating real relationships with people next to impossible.
Someone else it makes creating a relationship with difficult? Jesus. When our walls are up, it’s difficult to lower them enough to let Jesus in. Sure, we can still pray and read our Bible and go to church. But can we truly have relationship with Christ if we have our walls built up around us? I don’t think so. If it’s impossible to create meaningful relationship with people when our walls are up, why would it be possible with Christ? It’s not that he can’t see us through our walls; it’s that we can’t see him. He wants to come in. Break down our walls. Fill us with his peace and love. But he can’t. Because relationships are two sided. And even though he wants to have relationship with us, we have to also want it – enough to break down the barriers and let him in.
When we let him in, allow him to heal the hurts of our past, and put the little pieces of our hearts back together again, then and only then can we really break down our walls for good, allowing people and relationships back into our lives without fear of hurt or pain. We can’t erase the past from our memories, but through Christ, we can change the lens by which we perceive life. We don’t have to look at situations the same way. We don’t have to make decisions based on how we handled things in the past. We have a completely clean slate, and a new perspective from which to see the world through.
And life won’t ever be perfect. We are human. We hurt each other from time to time. But, through Christ’s presence in our daily lives, we don’t have to allow those hurts to dictate our actions. We don’t have to allow ourselves to become closed off from the rest of the world, surrounded by our high walls and past experiences. We can live a life of freedom and peace and love, confident in our relationship with Christ, and confident in our own unique callings and purpose in life.
Christ wants relationship with you – will you tear down your walls enough to let him in?