King David writes, in Psalm 16, ‘The boundary lines have fallen to me in pleasant places.’
And suddenly I hear the Lord say, ‘You need to bless your boundaries.’
My mind goes first, as you might imagine, to all the incredible parents in the world who have been busy setting boundaries for years—lots of easily made but hard-to-enforce rules to keep our kids on the straight and narrow, or at least, you know, safe, healthy, alive . . .
The problem is, those boundaries more often than not have resulted in their own set of problems - angst, frustration, conflict, defiance, guilt, outright rebellion . . . and we’re left wondering, how on earth did something we intended for good end up working so badly against us?
To parents everywhere, the Lord is saying, ‘You need to bless your boundaries. ‘
Bless the boundaries you have set. Declare that your boundary lines will not divide you, but unite you. It’s okay to have boundaries, but you need to bless them.
Your boundaries need to fall in pleasant places.
And to the rest of us, the ones who have set limits on what we’ll believe, who restrict our experience of God to everything that’s safe and familiar, to those who have ended up hemmed in or defined by your own understanding, or even by your hurts, your pain, your disappointment—you need to know that there is a better place for your boundary lines to fall. Your boundary lines need to fall in pleasant places. Not in a place of despair or arrogance or harm or fear.
So look around. Check your boundary lines. Wherever there is a boundary, whether it’s around your business, your church or community, your circle of friends, your emotional capacity, your worship (and what that looks like), the extent of your obedience or faith, and particularly, the boundaries of your love - wherever your boundary lines fall, it’s time to BLESS YOUR BOUNDARIES!
And then, watch as things shift. You’ll be amazed. You’ll stretch and grow and find yourself venturing a little further into the wilds of His grace and glory. You’ll breathe deeper, that’s for sure, and then, I imagine, the Father in heaven will have the joy of looking down on all his strangely happy children as they raise the united refrain: ‘Our boundary lines have fallen to us in pleasant places!’