04/22/2025
Do you ever struggle with a lack of boundaries and borders, and you feel like your life can get unruly, unmanageable, and out of control?
I do. I’ve experienced times where I overcommit, overextend, and overdo it. The aftermath leaves me exhausted and feeling like I’m walking through a dense fog. It makes me think of the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans 7, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15, ESV). I tell myself I’m not going to go beyond my boundaries, but then I find myself overextended and overdone.
G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.” When I first read that, I thought his description was a bit overstated, because, after all, who pays attention to the frame? It’s what lies within the frame that draws our focus and inspires our imagination.
The more I’ve contemplated Chesterton’s words, however, the more I’ve come to appreciate their subtlety. If it weren’t for the frame, we wouldn’t have a focus nor develop our imagination. The beauty of the frame is that it corrals the content from the mind of the artist to the imagination of the aesthete. Without it, the content bleeds out into what is unruly, unmanageable, and out of control.
Just like our lives.
We all need guardrails, not to restrict but to liberate our minds and hearts by giving us a safe place to create, dream, imagine, and live. This is why children play well in sandboxes. They have space to create and know where they are and not worry about where they are not.
Jordan Peterson tells us that the word paradise comes from pairi daiza , which means “walled garden” (We Who Wrestle with God, 41). We all yearn for paradise, not because we want to be barricaded in, but because we want to block out anything and everything that threatens to rob of us of our habitation of peace, security, creativity, and freedom.
John’s vision of heaven includes “a great, high wall with twelve gates” (Revelation 21:12). But that wall is not a prison to confine but a fortress to protect. That is how much God loves us. He protects us. He gives us boundaries and borders so that we are free to live and breathe and paint and play and create. Without them, we are an unmanageable mess where we no longer know where we are.
We are like John Bunyan’s character, Hopeful, in his classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress. His fellow pilgrim, Christian, leads him on an easier path only to discover they are now “out of the way,” and Hopeful asks, “Where are we now?”
I, too, have found myself “out of the way” at different junctures in life. Maybe you have as well. That is why boundaries, borders, and even picture frames are essential to our health and prosperity. Without them, we flounder. With them we flourish.
If you feel that your life is unruly, unmanageable, and out of control, maybe it’s time you stepped into the picture frame God has given you. Indeed, it is true that “IN HIM we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28, ESV).
