This past week I traveled to Juarez Mexico for work. It was my first time out of the country since college. I stayed over in El Paso, Texas and then each day I would venture over to Juarez with my colleagues. First off, I love the countryside in this part of the world. About 18 years ago I was driving back across country from my one year stint living in Southern California. On that cross country trek my favorite location of all was New Mexico. Not sure what it is about this section of the country but I connect with its features, drawn to the foothills, ridge lines, and land forms.
Every morning I found myself being driven across the border past lines of traffic while each day would close with being dropped off at the same border, walking across the pedestrian bridge back to America before being picked up again on the US side and returned to our hotel. Each and every day I encountered a protected border, a wall at parts, and large numbers of folks headed in both directions. It got me thinking about lands, homes, walls, boundaries, and opportunities.
If honest, most us at some time or another have found ourselves encountering our own border walls and a crossing. Something that stands in the way of the opportunity, the promise, the security, and peace we seek on the other side. Over there, out beyond here is something more that we seek, a better job, more pay, a better relationship or family life, more health, more comfort, or a better life for our children. We find ourselves staring up at a border wall that seems insurmountable and impassable. There is something on the other side that we want and desperately need but can’t seem to grasp, continually having it slip through our fingers. I call it abundant life. Behind us, on this side of the border there is often poverty, a poorness of spirit, maybe sickness and despair, hopelessness and doubt that you will ever make it past the wall into a land marked with the promise of more. Sometimes there are impediments, maybe even people standing in the way actively trying to keep us out. Many often give up and believe they will never make it over, maybe even starting to believe they don’t deserve what is over there anyway. But we’ve heard the faint echoes of those that have made it, the tales of lives well lived, peace and love found and kept. We want over there.
Crossing the Mexican border made me stop and consider all that people do and endure to cross each day. Some wait in long lines for hours on end. Others walk. I’m sure some have snuck across. A tunnel or two has been dug. Things, even people, have probably been smuggled both ways. Business flows and is transacted daily on both sides of the border. When before you there is opportunity and a dream of a better life, you stop at nothing to make that crossing. Except we do stop. We see the boundary keeping us out and we doubt, we lose hope. We get tired of waiting. Life is hard. We begin to tell ourselves that what’s on this side of the wall is not all that bad. We get comfortable. We find an easy, safe path. We forget those echoes of more that once set our ears and hearts ablaze. I wish I could go and shake each person awake for what is truly out there. See this season of my life has forced me awake, jolted me, unable to unsee what I now see. Unfortunately for most of us it takes something like this to jerk ourselves out of our found comfort. But I know there is more out there, a border to cross, a land of hope and promise, with large tall fences protecting it, many of my own making. It will take courage, discipline, embracing change, and most importantly dying to truly live. It is interesting because I know a guy that’s been on this type of crossing before. He’s showed me a way across. What I think I’ve seen and learned from him the most was that he saw what he wanted, what needed to be done, and he went and did it. Whatever it took and whatever the cost, he said I’m doing it to enter this land of opportunity. Didn’t matter if it was life, limb, pride, security, being misunderstood or even his divinity itself, He laid it all down to cross that border. The opportunity He saw, the dream He dreamed, was you and me with Him in a land without borders. So yes, I’m slowly learning a lot about what it takes to have the abundant life I seek, here and now. I’m passive by nature but He’s taught me that sometimes getting through that border looks like seeing what you want and not stopping until you have it. All of it. Even if it takes a tunnel.
From The Whale's Belly 