boundaries

This last week has been the fourth of July week and it has been rather slow around here. On Tuesday I was able to attend a 'workshop' like thing, where we talked with a local psychologist on realistic boundaries between staff and students. While a lot of it was review and refining my thinking for a much more professional environment, I began to reflect on the importance of boundaries for the sustainability of one's engagement in a difficult work environment. While working with the homeless I think that there needs to be a keen understanding of ones own personal limits and comfort zones. I also think that being very self aware of your weaknesses and style of interaction is crucial to being helpful in any situation. Being naive about your own personal issues causes you to not deal with them and then unintentionally pass them along in the helping process.

The difficult place that I often find myself in is the line between boundaries and love. Sometimes the line gets very blurry and you don't know if a hug is very appropriate and needed or very unprofessional and boundary crossing. I think that it is also difficult when the people that you are working with are a part of your life. You cannot just leave their realities and their problems on your desk at night, but they travel with you back home. I haven't yet decided if those boundaries are needed. I think that it would be easy to say that boundaries are needed to help and protect the student but often I think that they are more for the staff. If there are boundaries that we must uphold, we don't have to let people in, 'its more professional that way' and its another level that our hearts are prevented from connecting on.

As Christians, what are our boundaries called to look like? Are we given the luxury of boundaries that create space in relationships? What did the boundaries of Jesus look like? Jesus was definitely not masochistic in his ministry, burning himself out or living in perpetual exhaustion. He fiercely protected his time alone with his Father but I get a sense of his bodily tiredness at moments throughout the gospel. To do what Jesus did, his strength could not have come from him, his simply had to allow himself to be a human through which the strength of God perfectly flowed through. Without his unsevered relationship with God, his work could not have been completed.

Allowing myself to live as a child of Christ, I need to have eyes that are open to boundaries. I need to allow God to set my boundaries because without the Holy Spirit guiding me I will set them at the extremes of everything or nothing, both of which are not loving responses.