Border Country - Middleland

Hadrian's Wall

I recently watched a couple of programmes  about the part of the UK that straddles the border between England and Scotland.  The programme interested me because I was born and raised in a town near Hadrian's Wall and later in life lived over 25 years in Wallsend.  This patch of land centuries ago was known as Middleland and stretched from the Humber up to about Edinburgh, from east to west.  Problems first began after the Roman emperor Hadrian decided to build a wall between Carlisle in the west and Wallsend in the east and decided that everything south of the wall belonged to the Roman empire and all who lived north of the wall were savages to be kept out at all cost.  The trouble was that there were those who had family on both sides of the wall (a bit like what happened when they erected the Berlin Wall).  The people who lived there were all the same and yet a false sense of enmity had been created.  They were living out in the margins, excluded, not belonging.  But it wasn't about the people, it was about building an empire, taking over land and all that goes with it and creating a power system.

Maybe it's because my late husband wasn't English or maybe because I spent almost 10 years living in another country, a different culture and language that I find it difficult to come to terms with country borders and how humans fight over such borders, each side of the controversy trying to gain the land for themselves at the cost sometimes of many lives.  Empires have risen and fallen over such disputes.  People, the innocent as well as soldiers and fighters, are killed over this power struggle for land and domination.  I like the picture of the planet taken from space and the accompanying thought that from space there are no borders, no frontiers, no divisions.  And that is how God created the earth - one planet, one people - the human race.


Drawing border lines seems to be a deeply entrenched human trait.  We draw lines about many things.  The minute the line is drawn then people are divided - those on one side are acceptable while those on the other side are not.  People are put into categories depending on looks, fashion, ability etc and you are either in or out, accepted or excluded.  You have to take sides.  That is often the dilemma I face when it comes to a political election when I can see some things I like in more than one camp but I can only choose one party above another.  Then the elected ones seem to spend more time trying to score political points one against the other while the real interests of the people seem somehow less important and forgotten in the process.  Real issues are overtaken by the need to gain power, recognition, acclaim and numbers and build little personal empires.  We are told that this side is right, that side is wrong while the truth is probably some quite hazy, grey area in the middle.  Some people fit into neither camp but belong somewhere in between. 

I often feel like that when it comes to my own Christian living.  For someone who belongs to God but doesn't congregate in a building it's like being in the wilderness of no man's land, the middleland, neither in nor out, a bit of both.  There are those who question how you can belong to God but not a particular group or denomination.  They draw a line and you must decide which side of the line you are on.  Belonging to the group makes the empire bigger and apparently more powerful.  It becomes a matter of numbers, a head count and not about an individual relationship within the family of God.  Many find themselves in this no man's land when it comes to Christianity and church.  They love God and follow the teachings of Jesus but are not churchy.  Many who congregate consider them to be wrong; they have stepped over the line; they are now on the other side.  The truth is that most of them belong in neither camp but straddle the line that has been drawn between them.  I don't want to take part in the dividing game.  Divide and conquer is the devil's game while God's purpose is to make us one.  And so here I am, standing in the gap, a middlelander living in the wilderness of neither in nor out, not included in the group but not excluded from the family of God.  Or as Henri Nouwen said,

In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.  

AMEN!!!