Borders of Pleasant Stones

By User:Craig Michaud, CC BY 3.0,

“And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.” – Isaiah 54:12

Robert Frost, in “Mending Wall,” declared that “good fences make good neighbors.”

Isaiah conveys a word from the Lord that seems to agree. He speaks of a day when there will be peace, righteousness, and freedom from fear. Security will be assured and life will be pleasant for the people of God.

One of the features of such a day will be clearly defined borders or boundaries. There will be no ambiguity, no argument, and no confusion over what is yours or mine and where one stands.

I crossed over into a neighbor’s yard out of necessity this very day. Yet, as I did so, I knew that without permission and agreement, I was trespassing. I would have been crossing a line I had no business crossing.

Isaiah’s prophecy anticipates the day when no one crosses the line of violation of another person’s rights and dignity. As one popular Christian song of the sixties put it, “We’ll guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride and they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

What God will bring about as naturally as the rain in the righting of all things, we work very hard at today. What will flow freely in the day of the Lord’s righteousness, we struggle for in this realm of time, space, and sin. Lines of what is appropriate are being crossed all the time by some while others frantically seek to preserve them and protect what they perceive is their own.

In God’s new day, no one will have to protect his property, dignity, rights, or territory. God will take care of it all and it will be lovely.

Mending Wall
by Robert Frost

Download Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’