Part 2: Boundaries and the garden

What’s mine, what’s yours?

Children are not born with a natural ability to share, as they are not born with the ability to see things from the other person’s perspective (kids learn to internalize everything as a reason, that’s why when you are angry at, abuse (physically, sexually or emotionally) or beat a child, his sense of self is affected, because he makes it about him, not thinking that the problem could lie with you. The interesting contrast here is that we are born internalizing everything, then once we understand the role of the other person, we start externalizing it.

Start casting blame at all times, and stop looking within ourselves. But by the time we start realizing the effect others’ behaviors have had on us, our inner self is already affected. we are basically walking broken pieces. Anyway, we are not born with a natural capability to share and give. Sharing and giving are learned behaviors.

Because of that incapacity to share, kids are always attached to their possessions, their toys, constantly screaming “mine, mine, I”. This, parents attempt to correct by implying it’s not correct, it’s selfish. But this is usually one of the first steps in failing to establish who they are and determining their boundaries. Kids learn to become compliant, losing themselves in “ours, we”. Because they become so entwined with belonging in the “we”, that they forget who the “I”, and in time their sense of self is eroded.

You cannot establish who you are and establish boundaries if you don’t know what yours is, and what is not, who you are, and who you are not; When it comes to properties maintenance, one must know where their properties are and where it ends. It avoids impeding on another person's properties, which can be liable. if your boundaries are constantly blurred, constantly mixed with others… You invade people’s boundaries, and you let people invade yours. It’s like a country that does not know its boundaries people just walk in and out (Proverbs says a man without control is a city without walls, people just walk in and out) …

Guard your heart

proverbs 25:28

Medieval cities were characterized by their walls. The size of their walls would make them impregnable fortresses and would determine their strength, their ability to resist attacks from the enemy, ensuring the safeguarding of those already in. Indeed, a city that had no walls, no boundaries could just be overtaken by any army at any time. Nothing would keep the army out and keep those in, safe. People would flow in and out without proper regulation, without a gate, controlling those that were getting in, and those that were getting out. This means that the city could literally be inviting murderers and thieves in, and letting them get out with their spoils. These broken cities are symbolic of broken people who don’t guard their broken hearts by not setting boundaries…

The Bible says guard YOUR heart, meaning I alone am responsible for guarding it, who goes in, and what goes out. It is my responsibility, mine, mine alone to protect it, and not anyone else’s, as it is not mine to protect someone else’s. So I cant wait for you to get yourself together before I protect my heart, I cannot let your chaos spread to mine, so I love you but I will take precautions and measures to make sure I am not drowning. I protect my heart by making sure Good things go and stay in (think of this whatever is kind, pure, beautiful), and I let the toxic things out, any anger, past hurts, and bitterness. And if I need help it is my responsibility to communicate it.

The origin of boundaries

The scripture in Proverbs 3 24 asks us to guard our hearts, but how do we do that? In the beginning, God created man and placed him in the garden. And he commanded the man not to eat from the tree of Good and Evil for he will surely die. But the man was allowed to eat from any other trees in the garden including the tree of life. But enticed by the serpent, the man and his companion ate from the tree of Good and evil anyway. God put them out of the Garden (When you disobey God’s command, you are not hurting him directly, you are depriving yourself of the best, from what God had in store for you, from abundant life (John 10:10)). God put boundaries, cherubim with flashing swords to protect the way to the tree of life. God put Adam and Eve out, basically saying to them: “I cannot control you, keep you from choosing the tree of Good and evil, but I Can keep you from MY tree of life” #boundary.

This is what life is, we cannot control people’s chaos around us, but we can keep it from spreading to us. “I can’t control whether or not you choose to do what you to do or hurt me, but I can control my response to it”. God is strong on boundaries. Throughout the Bible we see a God that doesn’t control people, that doesn’t force people to not choose sin, but is clear that when you do, you must know you will not enter His house, His heaven, His rest. He says I have put in front of you Blessing and curses but choose life.

And when God sets boundaries it’s not by lack of love. He clothed Adam and Eve with animal skin, meaning he spilled some blood, still heartbroken and grieving over what men had done, but mostly grieving over the fact that now there had to be consequences for their actions, boundaries had to be set. He could not allow them to eat from the tree in their corrupted state. Allowing them to stay after eating the tree, would have been a form of enabling to live forever corrupted in his perfect Garden. Sometimes people do not change around us, because we enable them, We let them stay in the Garden even after they have eaten from the tree. But we not only harming ourselves, we are harming them too.

However, God put them out but still started an administration of redemption for them, which included sacrificing his own son on the altar so we’d be redeemed and allowed back in…Boundaries should not be the reason to not show grace to or cover other people, it must also cater for the possibility of restoring the other person once they have been made right instead of setting people on the gate of no return.

The cherubim were supposed to keep the tree in and keep any undesirable person out. That’s how we should guard our hearts. We tend to put walls around it. But the problem with walls is that they shut things in that need to be expelled, and keep things out that need to get in (Joshua 6:1). We need to have a cherubim-like gate to regulate flow. The good thing with Cherubim is that what they did was not permanent. Things could still flow in and out if they were allowed and authorized by God to do just that. We need the same process for our hearts. Cherubim like gates that will let good things in, Whatever is Pure, Whatever is Kind (Philippians 4:8) and let the toxic things we have picked up over the years out, anger, bitterness.#letthemout#letthemgo

Boundaries and the garden

1. Boundaries are set for our own protections: When we broke God’s command, we were kept from eating from the tree life. To continue benefiting from the garden we had to keep the boundaries. Just as for us to continue eating in others’ gardens and vice versa, we must keep the boundaries.

2. Boundaries avoid enabling: Sometimes we are responsible for keeping people broken, we enable people’s negative behaviors by keeping them in the Garden even after they have eaten from the forbidden tree. This not only harms us going forward, but it may also rob them of a chance of getting things right and getting better.

3. Boundaries are not the end of love; in fact, they are the highest expression of it. It is not lack of love that sets boundaries, that put Adam and Eve out of the garden; it was love. Allowing them to live forever after having eaten from the tree of Knowledge of good and evil would have been more harmful.

4. Boundaries are not a lack of trust. It is trusting that others can grow, trusting that they make the right decision for their lives, even outside of our garden. This applies to us also.

5. Boundaries remove the burden. When we put boundaries, it is an admission that we are a limited resource. They stop us from being at the center of people’s lives, and vice versa. They stop us from thinking that life only needs to happen around us and our garden.

6. Boundaries teach us to respect others’ choices. I always find it interesting that in religion or mythology, the only beings that impose their will on others are usually demons, vampires’ witches, and warlocks. God respects our choice, he presents the consequences of those choices and lets us choose. Boundaries teach to respect others’ choices.

7. Boundaries validate us by letting us know that our needs and feelings are important, others’ too.

8. Boundaries are not about walling ourselves in. Boundaries are not to keep people out, but to let them in safely.

9. Boundaries do not make us bad people. Sometimes we think putting boundaries, putting people out of our garden makes us bad people. We feel insensitive for not being there for others in their time of need, for being insensitive to their pain. We feel guilty and ashamed for setting boundaries, and others have learned to pray on that guilt too, so we would constantly retract our boundaries. Of course, in everything in life, there is balance. We want to be there for others. But being there for others does not mean we must drown with them. Our garden needs to be nurtured, so does our mental health. Boundaries are not selfish, just as self-care is not. Self-care matters. In fact, we can only as helpful to others to the extent that we can take care of ourselves. Otherwise, we find ourselves in relationships that involve caretaking and rescuing.

10. Not setting boundaries on the other hand would make us feel bad about ourselves. Not setting boundaries will lead us to repeatedly do things that do not line up with our self-concept, our values, conscience, and belief system. This will inevitably affect how we see ourselves. What we do affect how we appraise ourselves, how we see ourselves, and how we see ourselves determines our self-esteem. But our self-esteem also affects how we see ourselves, so the pattern continues, the spiral, the snake eating its own tail.

11. Boundaries will not make people love you less: Adam and Eve still went ahead and had a relationship outside of the Garden teaching their kids how to worship God. Experience has taught me that not setting boundaries is unattractive. We tend to be attracted by people with high self-esteem and high boundaries. But they sort of represent an ideal of what we look like to become. Low self-esteem and lack of boundaries are considered weak. Weak people become a doormat that is walked on repeatedly.

12. Not setting boundaries however will teach people how to treat us. It will teach people that they do not have to try hard to give us a modicum of respect because we do not know to ask what we want, what we deserve. They can get away with giving us less than what we want, and we will settle for it. And just like that, our pain becomes self-inflicted. Because yes, we cannot control how people choose to treat us, but we can control that we always let them know that it is OK to do so. And Adam and Eve disobeyed God, so he put them out of the garden. He taught them that following him required certain standards. They could not just get away with just about anything. They were allowed to do everything in the garden except for one, and they choose to do it anyway. There had to be consequences.

Empathy is the capacity of walking into someone else's shoes, to understand what they going through, and feel what they are feeling. Unfortunately, sometimes it is our empathy that is stopping us from putting necessary Boundaries. Boundaries have consequences. But we have to train ourselves so that our sense of self-care and boundaries will not be overtaken by empathy, and fear, and feelings. Takers have no limits, and their limits is our boundaries. Boundaries equates to self-care and self-care is not selfish. Self-care allows to water, nourish and nurture our own garden. Self-care allows us to give from a place of fullness rather than depletion.