That Wall.

Child it’s time to break the shell

Life’s gonna hurt but it’s meant to be felt

You cannot touch the sky from inside yourself

You cannot fly until you break the shell

India. Arie, Break the Shell

India. Arie, in speaking about her song, Break the Shell, indicates a time when she was “fighting to grow”, a process she found to be “dehumanizing”.

Many of us have walls that we need to scale but we find it scary to make that first move. We find it difficult to make a plan to get over those walls, much less to tackle it. Instead, what happens is that we spend too much time dreaming instead of planning an escape. Before we know it, it has gotten impossible to make a move towards them.

But the people who live there are strong, and the cities have walls and are very large. We felt as small as grasshoppers, and that’s how we must have looked to them.

Numbers 13: 28, 33

We become like the men who Moses sent to spy in Canaan; we allow ourselves to become so small that we make the wall more powerful than it ever had a right to be. We also make ourselves too small and too insignificant in the eyes of those who guard those walls and keep us trapped within.We begin to see ourselves through the eyes of others and belief that their view of us is the only image that matters. We begin to wonder if we can grow tall enough and strong enough to conquer them and then we begin to lie to ourselves, rather than test our faith, by putting our trust in the will of the Creator for us.

That wall we build to keep everything out, the good and the bad. When we think it’s safer to keep in and keep everything out, even the things we are meant to keep. That wall we nurture, ignoring everyone that is on our team, only we did not know, because we built it to high to really see and know and grow. The wall we used to judge too harshly, can only be destroyed when we stop and accept people for who they are and not how we feel about them.

That wall can cause us to stop stretching to avoid the pain that comes with too much movement, and stop trying to escape the hurt that jumping and missing brings. So we forget that that wall was never that great in the first place, and never that strong to begin with, until we gave it the power to be so.