Hi friends! Today we’re taking a brief break from the Rest series, because I am so excited about the release of The Wall Around Your Heart!
The premise of this book is that pesky wall around your heart, the impenetrable fortress you vow to build higher and higher so no one can break in. When we’re hurt, we protect. We wall off. We retreat. We leave. We falsely believe that life is too painful now, and leaving relationships will protect us from further pain. – Mary DeMuth, The Wall Around Your Heart
We all do it. We get in a friendship or love relationship or business partnership and end up hurt. Sometimes the hurt is our own fault (admit it, sometimes it is), often the hurt comes from the other party without meaning to (their mess collides with your mess…), and even, at times, we find we have run into someone deliberately bent on hurting others. Regardless of how it happens, when we get hurt, our instinct is to protect ourselves from letting it happen again. And so we build walls.
Using the roadmap of the Lord’s Prayer, Mary DeMuth walks us through how Jesus will pull down those walls through prayer and in community. She even addresses how to protect ourselves from those “wolves in sheep clothing,” and still keep ourselves open to healing community.
The Wall Around Your Heart is written in an easy-to-read style, with many of Mary’s personal stories interjected throughout. She starts with the Scripture of the Lord’s Prayer as her base, but also includes other Scripture references for further study. Several places in the book have prayers to guide you to pray for specific circumstances and the end of every chapter includes questions to help you grow in being openhearted.
I highly recommend this book to people who have been hurt by community, who are nursing raw relational wounds, with freshly built walls. I strongly suggest this book to people who have scars from years of hurt, whose walls are tall and deep. God has plans to break through all of these. Let’s together declare, “Take down the bricks, whatever it takes,” and find the sweetness of community on the other side.
If you have a wall firmly built around your heart, ask Jesus, the great gateway, to make a doorway through. He can. He is the gate. He is the avenue leading toward a rich and satisfying life—not a stingy, walled-off life. – Mary DeMuth, The Wall Around Your Heart
You can buy The Wall Around Your Heart on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as in local stores. If you don’t see it on the shelves, ask if they can order a copy for you.
If The Wall Around Your Heart sounds like a book that would help others you know, would you share this review and encourage them to check it out?
One final note: Mary DeMuth has another book expected to release early next year. Not Marked: Finding Hope and Healing after Sexual Abuse was recently crowd-funded after traditional publishers deemed it too risky an investment. From what I’ve heard of it so far, I believe this book will minister to many hurting people marginalized by shame and fear of being marked. Pray for that book and for Mary as she has a lot of work ahead of her to prepare that for release.
