Fortress
“And if I built this fortress around (my) heart
Encircled (me) in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire”
~ Fortress around (My) Heart
I used to play on some sand dunes in my home town. Whatever is coming to mind when you think of sand dunes, divide that by a hundred. Not much to look at, really, and not the soft sand, flowing sea grasses of most of the beaches you’ve likely seen. But the small park and the two sets of disconnected piles of sand were everything in our childhood imaginations.
We waged wars with slingshots, rocks, bottle rockets, and even Roman candles across that chasm. We spent hours drawing up our battle plans for that theater of war. Like most hunting or fishing trips, the preparation and the hanging out were where all the real action was. Not much really materialized in terms of the thing we were there to do.
Ironically, my strongest memory of that park was not that “battlefield” but the large, beautiful house facing the beach on the cliff that bordered the park and those dunes. My childhood didn’t feel safe, and I felt very much alone in navigating the vagaries of my early years. A friend told me the guy who owned that big house, completely encircled in high bricks, was an attorney.
Although completely subconsciously, somewhere in my small boy heart, I made an agreement. I would become a lawyer and build a big house encircled by a brick wall and live safely behind it, protected from everyone and everything. It shouldn’t be too big a surprise that a decade later, I chose a college I knew nothing about because I heard they had a great law school.
“Then I went off to fight some battle
That I'd invented inside my head
Away so long for years and years”
Though I didn’t become a lawyer and never built a house with a big brick wall, I did, nonetheless, build a “fortress around my heart” and “encircled it with trenches and barbed wire”. It was meant to protect me from further harm and violation, but it also distanced me from every other person in my life. And it didn’t make me feel safe.
That isolated living, inability to feel, and distance I placed between myself and everyone had catastrophic effects. My marriage and every other thing in my life was beginning to fail. I didn’t need bigger and better walls for protection, I needed the wall and barbed wire to be torn down, the trenches crossed.
Twenty years of dealing with deeply broken places finds me in a very different place. A restored marriage, better relationships with all my children, and the healthiest friendships and partnerships. I am experiencing greater professional satisfaction and consequently much larger impact from my vocation than I could have ever imagined.
Recently, I returned to the sand dune’d park of my chidhood. I hadn’t see it in decades.
“As I returned across the fields I'd known
I recognized the walls that I'd once laid
Had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I'd laid”
Without the necessary healing journey I had been on, those fields would have been booby-trapped with mines that my childhood would have placed there. But seeing that playground didn’t awaken long-arrested brokenness and fears. and it was actually a very peaceful time of remembering.
And then I looked up at the cliff to glimpse that impenetrable fortress I found so necessary in my childhood. It was completely gone. An empty, freshly mowed field of grass where the fortress had once sat. And there were no remnants like you often find when you visit a ruined castle. Nothing.
It felt very satisfying. There was no longer a house that required protection and my heart no longer needed it either.
Consider
What agreements did you make as a child?
Have you done the work of excavating, addressing, and getting the necessary healing to get freedom from all the trauma that caused the agreements?
We’ve now taken over 750 people through our life-changing LifePlanning process. And given the impact it had on my life, you might not be surprised that woven into the fabric of that incredibly immersive experience is the opportunity to do your own work on the necessary healing and restoration I’ve found.