When The Walls Came Tumbling Down

When The Walls Came Tumbling Down

A person without self-control is like a city with broken-down walls. Proverbs 25:28

Thirteen-year-old Haley was exquisitely beautiful at a time when many middle school girls are awkward. She had unblemished porcelain skin and thick, dark curly hair. When she entered a room, people were stunned by her beauty. At the county fair, she won Fairest of the Fair. Wherever she went, everyone noticed her. Whatever the “it” factor was, she had it. In spades.

Then things began to change. When she turned fourteen, she came to see me for a sore throat, and I noticed a hint of cigarette smoke in her hair. A few months later, she blemished her otherwise snow-white skin with the first of many tattoos.

One day, when she was sixteen, I pointed to a homemade tattoo emblazoned on her upper arm and asked, “Whose initials are those?”

“Oh that’s for Dougy-D.”

I knew the young man she was talking about, and he wasn’t exactly a role model. He was ten years older than she was, and he’d been in and out of the ER with injuries from fighting and drug use. I warned her that the cracks in her self-control and judgment could lead her where she didn’t want to go. But she paid no attention.

A few months passed, and I saw her again. This time I noticed fresh marks on her arm—not from new tattoos, but from IV drug use. Again, she dismissed me.

Like today’s verse warns, the walls of this beautiful girl’s character had been dismantled one brick at a time until the barbarians at the gate had run roughshod through her fair city. Her pristine beauty was gone, replaced with dark eyeliner and darker circles under her eyes.

Nothing that anyone said could prevent her further destruction. She continued her risky behavior and eventually dropped out of school. With no structure and no self-control, it wasn’t surprising when the next time she showed up in the ER, she was dead on arrival from a drug overdose.

Untended cracks in a wall become great divides until the wall crumbles under disrepair. Haley was a tragic example of how self-centered choices hurt not only ourselves, but everyone around us. Only through self-control and accountability can we shore up the walls of defense against the enemy’s fiery darts.

TODAY’S RX

Preserve the walls around your heart and mind so you won’t be tempted to let them decay.

Guard my heart and mind, Lord. Keep me away from temptation. Help me to plant myself firmly in your Word, so that I can be faithfully grounded in you.