Wednesday 8 May 2013

Boundaries

When my daughters were very small we would create invisible boundaries to allow them to have a sense of freedom to run or explore while being close enough that we could protect them. They learned that boundaries might be smaller in a crowded place or near a road, and that a shout of 'boundary!' from me meant that they were to go no further. Every year at our regular holiday haunt we would walk around the site setting the boundary that there play had to stay within, and every year the area got bigger. Now they are grown up and boundaries around us have different meanings. There are new boundaries of privacy and independence that we may not cross, and the old understandings of how far apart we may be geographically are not only unnecessary but altered by new ways of crossing the boundaries using our smartphones or computers.

On Sunday members of Piddington church were treated to a thought provoking presentation on boundaries by two of the family service team. They found boundaries in many places, tracing ecclesial, civil, safety, temporal and spatial boundaries before considering the boundaries created by the human heart. God, they reminded us, both respects the boundaries between human and divine (we retain free will after all), and also breaks some of them down. God's love reaches beyond our stubbornness and our wilfulness. It reaches across the seemingly uncrossable boundary of sin and offers us the invitation to step over and into grace.