Good fences make good neighbours

I’m not usually a controversialist but I have a controversial message for the church today. Boundaries are bad. Stay with me, I hope that by the end of this post I will have persuaded you.

Where do they come from?

They seem to me to be a toxic import from our secular Western, individualistic culture. Pop psychology’s answer to the phenomenon of a world full of need and a life full of responsibilities. How can I protect myself from the needs of others? I can have boundaries, they’re healthy relational things, the psychologists tell me so, sigh of relief. Except as far as I can see there is no basis for the concept of boundaries in the Bible. Where are boundaries in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet? Where are they in laying down your life for a friend? Where are they in the cross? It seems to me that communities of grace were supposed to be modelled on sacrificial love, on turning the other cheek, on letting relationships be costly, on a mutual inter-dependence. Jesus’ compassion for the sick and the suffering and the hurting had no self-imposed limits.

Boundaries in the secular culture come from an observation of co-dependency. This is where one of the parties in a relationship facilitates the helplessness of the other by enabling it. This places an intolerable burden on the person supporting. So Western individualistic psychology says, the needy person is the problem. They need to learn independence, to take responsibility for themselves. The co-dependent will help them by refusing to help them, by imposing a boundary.

The Bible has a different answer

Co-dependency is a real problem but it lies not with the needy person by with the facilitator. People have needs, real, physical and emotional needs. Some people who have suffered a lot have a lot of them. Supporting them can feel exhausting, draining, impossible. They may make demands that just can’t be met. But co-dependency arises not out of the need of the other but out of my need to be a saviour. If I think or am even subconsciously afraid of the fact that I am responsible for meeting this person’s needs I will be overwhelmed and push back against them. I will tell them that their needs are wrong. But the issue is not with them, as so often when we take a look, it is with me. I sense their needs are beyond my capacity to meet, and I am right, they absolutely are. But the point is, it is not my responsibility to meet their needs, it is simply my responsibility to love them with the fullest extent of my resources.

The liberating truth of the gospel is that we are all needy beyond the point of hope or help, but that we have a Saviour who came down to bear our burdens, to heal the sick, bind up the broken hearted and set the prisoner free. He alone can save. When I allow myself to believe that I am the saviour, that it is my job to fix people I will become afraid and overwhelmed and push back against people. I will hurt them. When I know that it is Jesus’ job to save and heal and set free, I am free also to love people in a sacrificial, generous way because their wellbeing does not ultimately depend on me. I can live in the reality that Jesus places us in relationship to love sacrificially, knowing that the point where I leave off because I have run out of resources, he will not because he never runs out of resources.

And incredibly, this is what my suffering, needy friend needs to hear too. Not that they need to take responsibility for their problems, that they are a problem that I need to manage with boundaries, but that there is a loving, heavenly saviour who has us both. And being unafraid of your need sets me free to do my part in meeting it, by showing you the kind of sacrificial love that you have learned not to expect from anyone and by simultaneously pointing you to the one who is the source of meeting all our needs, by saying “I love you, because he first loved us,” by saying my love, it is here for you because of his. When we cease to think we are the saviour, we are free to express radical acts of loving kindness and generosity, we cease to think of ‘you and I’ and begin to think of ‘we together’ being recipients of his grace and gifted with resources to love one another. And as we model that to our needy friends, as we show that we are unafraid of them and need, we will help them to understand what it means that there is a saviour who loves them and in whose hands and love they are ultimately safe and who has all the resources necessary to meet all of their needs.

Because when we become believers, God does not send us on our way, to follow him as strong, independent people. He gives us communities of grace to learn from one another what it means that we have a Saviour full of grace and love for us. A needy person may believe that they need you, the truth is that they need to learn that they need Jesus, but you won’t teach them that by sticking them out in the cold, by putting up boundaries for ‘healthy relating’. That is not the gospel way, the way of radical grace that is beyond human imagination for tracing out. A needy person needs Jesus, but the way that they will learn that is if you model that you need Jesus in your relationship with them. If you found it on prayer, if you point them to him as you love them as the source of your love, if you centre your relationship in scripture.

Personal experience

I can honestly testify to the truth of this gospel way, as a giver and as a recipient of gospel grace under the Lordship of Christ. I am one of these needy people, I have hurts and damage that scream for healing, I externalise my self-worth so that they way the last person treats me is the way I see myself, I can be desperately frightened by rejection and by authority and desperately in need of reassurance of people’s love when they have acted in a way that has triggered my fears. And I have experienced phenomenal change and healing, but never at the hands of ‘boundaries’, always at the hands of astonishing saints who have loved me in astonishingly sacrificial ways, whilst never ceasing to point me to the one who is the healer and the saviour and the true bringer of change. The ones who have never treated me as a burden because I am not their burden to bear, are also the ones who have loved me with a generosity forged by the certainty that it is not their responsibility to save me. Who have opened their houses, who have left their phones on through the night, who have offered to come and get me to keep me safe, who have invested time and love beyond the usual reach of anything but possibly close, loving family and who have relentlessly throughout told me of the one who is holding me and loving me and saving me and is still able to be there when they are not. Who have taught me to trust Jesus because they trust him with me. Who have told me constantly not that I must take responsibility for myself, a task for which I am singularly ill-equipped, but that Jesus has me and holds me and protects me and owns me and keeps me.

These people have gifted me a ministry that is able to be like them, generous to those in desperate need, without being afraid, because I am not responsible for them, Jesus is. So I can love them and not feel burdened by their pain and need, because it belongs not to me, not even to them, but to Jesus.

A new way of relating

So, what are some of the ways living this out looks like in practice. Well I would argue, one way is to move ourselves mentally away from the language of boundaries entirely, which has toxic, exclusionary overtones and instead to talk about limitations. Because boundaries are invented, but limitations are real, and very much a Bible concept.

The power of limitations are that they are about me, not the person in need. You have need, that need is real and genuine and matters but I will not always be able to meet it, because I am weak. And that is good, because ultimately it is not me that you need to trust for your needs, but Jesus. That does not mean I abdicate my responsibility to love you to the fullest of my capacity, that is my responsibility in Christ. It means that when I tell you ‘no’ it will not be because there is a problem with you and your need, but because there is a limitation in me.

We are finite, we have limited resources and many demands on them. I cannot meet every need that I encounter and I am not supposed to. But when I say no, it is not from a defensive posture, because I know that it is not my responsibility to fix you. It is simply my responsibility to love you as best I can alongside all the other responsibilities I have in my life. Including the responsibility to look after myself physically, emotionally and spiritually. Jesus took time out, he went away to pray and be with his Father because he knew that was what he needed to keep his perspective right, to keep living in the dependence on God which we need to model to the needy.

Suddenly our relationship transforms from one of power and weakness to weakness and weakness. I am not controlling my friend with my no, I am not sitting above them, telling them they are a problem, I am not ‘teaching them independence’. I am expressing my own weakness and needs. I bring myself down to their level and let them see that I too am human and that together we need Jesus. It takes humility to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you right now, I am too weak.” It can be hard. It takes humility to say, I love you but I can’t meet your need right now, but Jesus can. A ‘no’ in fear and hardness feels like a rejection, and in the wrong place can drive me into a frenzy. A ‘no’ clearly articulated in weakness feels like love.

Where boundaries can be right and good

Having gone into great detail for the case against boundaries I want to say that there are cases where boundaries are good and necessary. These cases involve abuse. Putting up boundaries against a needy friend – protecting yourself from their need – and putting up boundaries against an abusive person are entirely different things. Sometimes it is right and appropriate to protect yourself and it forms part of the self-care and dependence on God I was talking about above. When a person is attempting to physically or emotionally damage you, to deliberately hurt you, it is right to be very clear and firm with them that you will not accept that, and potentially take steps to prevent them doing so. That also reveals Christ, because it shows that you are his child and precious too him and will not accept someone else’s attempt to rob you of that reality.

In such cases it may be necessary to restrict access, to limit communication or a whole other range of measures to ensure you make it clear, as far as it is possible that you reject this person’s behaviour. However, this should always be held with grace, with a readiness to forgive, with or without repentance, and where there is repentance to restore relationship. Where abuse has been persistent, or there no true repentance, or there is evidence that expressions of repentance are being used by an abuser to re-establish control in order to abuse again, it may be appropriate for those restrictions to be permanent.

Negotiating the grey areas

Sometimes these things will not be clear cut.

For instance, there may be occasions where there is genuine repentance and commitment to change, but relationships will still need to be handled carefully if your own weaknesses make you vulnerable to the abusive or sinful behaviour of the other person. But once again we are returning to the language of limitations, because I am weak and limited, I am struggling in these ways to deal with your difficult behaviour and its consequences in me, and to help me with that I need these restrictions.

An example of this is a friend of mine who taught me to recognise my anger. As I began to recognise it and express this emotion that had previously just been trapped inside me making me want to hurt myself, for the first time, I did not know what to do with it. On one occasion, whilst I was living with her, I deliberately turned a chair over in her kitchen in my anger. I was immediately repentant, sorry for my actions. I apologised and she forgave me and said she did not mind.

However, I am very fragile when it comes to the anger of others. If someone came into my house and turned over a chair in anger, I would probably be very afraid. I am also very fragile to feeling unsafe in the place where I live. Because of my weakness, I might therefore think it was appropriate to say to a friend who had turned a chair over in anger in my house that it would be better for my well-being if we no longer met in my house. This is not about punishing them, or teaching them consequences or assuming their repentance is not sincere. It is simply about my weakness and the real consequences on me as a result of their actions because of that.

You might call this a boundary, but it is not one that is expressed in terms of judgement, condemnation, superiority or distrust, but rather one expressed in terms of my weakness. Again, it doesn’t exclude, it says, we together, both, are weak, fragile people in need of healing by our saviour.

An appeal

I think if there is one take away message from this post it is this. Let’s stop being afraid. Fear is the enemy of radical love, and radical love is the way of the cross. We live in a world of pain and suffering, where the clamour of the needs of the world makes us want to protect ourselves, to say, this space here is mine, I have to look after myself, your needs are an imposition and need to be kept at a distance. We live in a world that says put yourself first, take care of your own, that idolises independence and shames and despises weakness. We live in a world that says one and one is two and I must maintain my boundaries to prevent you encroaching on what is mine and to teach you to stop others encroaching on what is yours.

The gospel says God is the provider, the meet-er of needs. It says to serve others is to be great in his kingdom, to lose is to gain and that one and one is one, the one body of Christ. The gospel says, you and I, together are weak. We need one another, we need Jesus, that everything we have and are come from him and are at his service and therefore at the service of one another, following the example that he set. We are not called to be strong, independent individuals, we are called to be a community of grace that takes on Jesus’ mission into the world. To heal the sick, set the prisoners free, bind up the broken hearted and call the sinners to repentance.

But we cannot live like this unless we are set free ourselves by our own dependence on the grace and provision of God, in our own lives and with the lives of others around us. Unless I know that there is one who meets my needs, your needs are a threat to me, unless I know you are not my burden, I will be afraid to start loving you or fall down in my attempt to carry you and run away from you because you hurt and exhaust me. We cannot live like this unless we are humbly prepared to admit that my weakness and limitations are the problem, not your need.

We should not be afraid that others need us. We should expect that. The size of their need should not deter us from offering what we have, whilst pointing to our own weaknesses and God’s sufficiency.

A couple of months ago I knelt in the street next to a man who was bleeding badly from his head. I held a jumper to his wound and reassured him that the ambulance was coming. He was coughing blood, he probably had internal injuries, those I could not help. But I could stop his bleeding and I could call out to the people who were equipped to do more. The man was a drug addict and probably a thief, he had been violently attacked. The world says protect yourself, walk by, you can’t fix this problem, he brought it on himself. But I could kneel by his side and hold a cloth to his wound and tell him, it’s OK, help is coming. The man who attacked him came back, threatened me, but I could not move, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference, but I felt that to move away was to say that this man did not matter, that his life was unimportant because he was weak and sinful and broken. And I couldn’t do it. The gospel crosses boundaries, takes risks and takes a stand against the lies of Satan.

People I knew passed by, but they had children with them, they did not stop. They were right not to stop. They had other responsibilities that meant they did not have the resources to help at that moment.

Needy people have psychological and emotional wounds, sometimes as serious as the wounds of the man on the street. It may be at times as foolish to say to them, ‘take responsibility for yourself, make good choices, call your own ambulance, heal your own wounds’ as it would have been to say that to the man who lay on that street that day. We do no service to ourselves, our church or the gospel when we put barriers up against the needy and hurting, when we hold them at a distance because we are afraid of their need, when we sit in judgement on them because they are weak in ways we can’t understand.

This is my appeal to the church. Do what you can. Tell them why when you can’t. Point them relentlessly to the God who loves you both.