Fence Mending

“No man is an island.”  “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Have you ever thought of yourself as a wall-builder?  Recently I was privileged to watch a DVD by Ray Van der Laan produced by Focus on the Family.  It was the final segment of a series focused on how God was training His people, Israel, to be His people.  The setting was a gan (garden) on a hillside in Israel. 

Visualize a respectable-sized hill (see below) terraced with garden areas lined with rock walls.  The outside wall of your garden plot is no more than a foot high but the wall hugging the hillside is possibly 10 feet high.  The rocks used to build the wall are close fitting and obviously took some thought and effort to build.  The stones in these walls very likely go back to the time of Joshua in the Old Testament which is pretty awesome to think about in itself.  

You want to make the soil in your gan as rich as possible because you only have a very small area in which to raise your olive trees or grapevines.  The vital thing about these terrace walls is the importance of keeping them strong.  For instance, what if you come to tend your grapes one morning and discover that 2-3 rocks have come loose from the wall on your section of hill side and come to rest at the base of an olive tree?

You would be wise to fit the rocks back into their original spots, pounding them in firmly.  If the rocks are left dislodged, when the rains come, the water will pour down that break in the wall and eventually the precious topsoil of your neighbor’s gan will come flooding down the hillside as further rocks dislodge.  Not only that, the eroding process could well cause a breach in your outer wall, washing away your precious topsoil.  This could continue and eventually wipe out a community’s way of earning a living.

That long explanation is a description of how God was teaching “community” to His people, Israel. A community should work together so that not only your household  is safeguarded, but also that of your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor.  There is more analogy to be had concerning the rich topsoil needed to grow healthy plants, but I won’t I won’t pontificate on that.  The main point is that every responsible member of any sort of community needs to be a wall builder-mender.  Otherwise, the consequences of sticking our heads in the sound could well be fatal.