We all do it. Some of us are better are it than others. For centuries, people have built walls to protect themselves from the enemy. We believe that the taller the wall, the thicker the wall, the less chance of someone getting through that wall…where they find us exposed for who we truly are. If I wasn’t busy building walls, I was busy running away. When you surrender, you have to stick around long enough for the other side to accept your surrender and I am pretty sure I didn’t do that. I was a coward. I tried to put on the “game” face that everyone always talks about and dressed the part. Have you done that? Maybe you don’t want to admit it, but you know it’s true. Every once in a while, I need someone to come up and just knock me upside the head and get my attention. To call me out. To say what needs to be said because it is the truth, not because they are trying to hurt me. Because they care and love me. Are there certain people that you are more cautious around because you have not yet learned to trust that relationship yet? Yes. Even now, I find myself in circumstances that require decisions to be made that could change things forever. I have gathered my wall-building supplies and have begun to reconstruct what took years to break through. The walls never completely come down, but are showing up again. I can tell. I can feel them. I have begun to second guess the things that should come to me like a second nature and the things I thought were true maybe never were. Why? I don’t want to go back to that way of thinking and living. So, I have to stop the process of those walls going back up. But how do I do that? How do I quit from over thinking something because I have not been told overwise? I have to stop guessing and to keep being open to what is in front of me, right now. I have to open the gates (maybe just leave them ajar) and I must force myself to welcome those that I have allowed to enter. Keeping people out may be the purpose of the wall, but what do you do when the enemy is already living behind the walls you built? You still have to open the gates, and let the enemy escape. Put down the chisel and pulley and stop…just stop. Eventually, what you have built will fall, but for now, just stop building so that the walls don’t get any higher.
Michelle Homme 2012 ©
