The Wall

One morning there were two women standing on either side of a wall. They yelled to each other what a wall looked like.

"Mine is bright red and tall."

"Mine is bright green."

Each was confused over this. Wasn't a wall always red? Or always green?

And what was better? Red or green?

Then one yelled to the other:

"Let us climb over our walls, so that we may see each other true, not separated such as this."

And so they climbed. And met each other face to face at the top of the very same wall, painted red on one side, and green on the other.

My sister and I had an argument this morning. I won't say which side was which, but basically there were two arguments, and we were banging our heads trying to understand the other and have the other understand us. It went something along the lines of this:

"Everyone loves their child as much as the other, and this love is perfect. We all do our best that we know at the time and we cannot ask of ourselves any more than this."

The other side: 'There are different qualities of love, and it is in being able to see when we are not loving our children the best that we can then move ourselves to love more and better and grow spiritually. We can always love better."

And as I look at these two arguments, I realize they are two sides of one whole truth: Love is perfect, but we often love imperfectly. We always do our best, which is all we can ask of ourselves, but we can always do better. This is the nature of our human existence.

And so I climb that wall to meet my sister face to face, to realize we were standing on two sides of the same wall.