No More Walls

Last week, I completed tearing down the rock walls. I had to leave 5 huge boulders that I couldn't carry, but they are not connected to walls. They are lying on the ground, isolated, not part of any building. Les will carry them up to the rock pile. Whew! That was a job. (Les was hard at work on another project he will report about later.)
Those walls were shockingly solid. When we started taking them down, we assumed that the walls were the two layers of rock we could see. We had no idea that there were layers underneath.
All the time I worked on the rocks, I thought about the walls that we build between people, that the walls are so often deeper than we realize.
I enjoyed seeing the movie, Lincoln last year, an excellent representation of the passing of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States. What we all realize, however, is that the passing of that amendment was only the first layer of the wall that kept the races separate. Freed slaves did not experience true freedom. Black men and women were considered inferior by most white men and women, and were treated as such. Most states passed laws which made it hard for blacks to vote, to be educated, to own property, or to even support their families. We are still digging out rocks of the wall of discrimination today.
My thoughts did not stop there. I don't think we realize how deep the walls are that we build. In relationships, we realize that we have a wall that we don't want, so we start to tear it down, and are shocked to see how difficult it is to do.
A friend may hurt your feelings, so you put a wall up to protect yourself. The next interaction is somewhat tense, and the wall gets a little higher. Eventually, you want to tear the wall down, but it is more difficult than you thought. It is hard to get the friendship reconciled. The same is true in marriages,  between Christian brothers and sisters, in all relationships really. Walls are built one stone at a time, one little remark that hurts, then a cold shoulder, then a sour attitude, a quick reply, pretty soon there is a wall that is hard to tear down.
Tearing the wall down takes determination, hard work, and perseverance. Wouldn't it be nice to have free flow of communication and emotions in all of our relationships?