It is easy in life to build walls. Walls separate – they keep some people out and others in. They are hard to penetrate. Sin is a wall we build that separates us from God.
Building a wall is aimed at restricting some other person. The truth of the matter is that it really restricts me if I build a wall.
Michael Duduit quotes an incident that was recorded on November 25, 2010, as an AFP story.
A 64-year-old pensioner in the eastern German town of Gumperda decided to seal off his cellar. He got bricks and mortar and food and drink and went downstairs to start building the wall to seal the cellar.
He finished his work, but discovered that he was on the wrong side of the wall. The wall he built sealed him in the cellar. He was a victim of his own wall.
He spent the weekend trapped in the basement, but on Monday morning he started trying to get out. He took his drill hammer and went to work, not on the wall he had just built, but on the firewall separating his home from his neighbors.
To complicate matters he had already been at odds with his neighbors during the past months. They called the police when they heard the loud drilling. The officers were waiting for the hobby handyman and arrested him when he finally broke through to his neighbor’s house.
The German handyman made a critical mistake. He became trapped by his own wall. He then made another mistake. Instead of tearing down the wall he had just built, he decided to go sideways into his neighbor’s house.
Can walls really come down? Look what happened with Joshua and the wall. Paul saw walls come down through Jesus Christ. He writes, “Jesus Himself is our peace…and broke down the dividing wall.” (Ephesians 2:14)
One of the comments about the fall of the Berlin Wall was that it helped free up the people who actually built the wall. Walls have a way not only of hurting those against whom we are building them, but hurting ourselves.
Robert Frost once wrote that there was something in him that didn’t like a wall and wanted it down.
In life and relationships my prayer is that “the walls will come tumbling down.”
