The Gate

 The Gate is finished!!!!

I have had the picture of this gate in my head for…ev...er!!! Today I finally got to work on it. Must say, it was easier that I thought it would be! Just knocked off a few slats from an old pallet and sandwiched a piece of tin roof between. The little blue bird was on a bird feeder that my sister gave me years ago, and I like it here now. The gate swings on a couple of brand new hinges that I found at Habitat today for $2…for the pair!!! It swings shut nicely and doesn’t even have to be latched. The idea was to have a way to visually enclose the labyrinth without really walling things off too much. 

Mission accomplished!

Now that I think about it, that makes more sense than I thought! We’re supposed to be like that, too….set apart, separated with Christ, but still living and active in this world. We aren’t supposed to wallow in things that would not honor Christ, but we shouldn’t be so walled off we can’t see to go where He may want to send us to serve.

There are a lot of things that wall us off, too! I’ve just started a book study with a group of friends. The book is called The Good and Beautiful Life by James Bryan Smith. He opens this book talking about something that he calls our narratives. Those are what I call our filters, those things that we sift the rest of the world thru. He makes some wonderful points throughout the book about how to examine our narratives and make sure they are the narratives of Christ. We are human, after all, and it is soooo easy to erect walls and shut gates that were never meant to be there…and sadly, be perfectly ok with it.  

 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

Matthew 7:3

OK, so that verse has nothing to do with a gate, but it sure shows us how we can miss the gate altogether! We have all had it happen to us…so easy to see a problem, or habit, or something in a friend’s life, but totally miss the MAJOR obstacle in our own lives. It all goes back to perspective, tho’. That personal plank of ours juts out from us ~ Just picture it for a second…every time we make a move in life it is jutting out there ready to throttle the world. 

We can’t “notice” our own plank without help, without our allowance of another’s voice. So, today I’m asking my Carpenter to get the crow bar out and start pulling planks…

Swing wide the city gates—the righteous gates!
    I’ll walk right through and thank God!
This Temple Gate belongs to God,
    so the victors can enter and praise.

Thank you for responding to me;
    you’ve truly become my salvation!

Psalm 118:19-21 ~ The Message Version