The Fence and the Garden: What Boundaries Are Actually For

Last updated on: July 6, 2026 at 5:45 pm by Christine Moriarty Field

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The Fence and the Garden: What Boundaries Are Actually For 2026-07-06T17:45:46-05:00 Christine Moriarty Field

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I used to believe, somewhere beneath the level of conscious thought, that being a good Christian woman meant being endlessly available. That every request for my time, my energy, my attention, carried something close to moral weight — and that to say no was to fail some quiet test of love.

It took me decades, a law career, a remarriage to a pastor, and a great deal of exhaustion to understand that this was never actually what Scripture asked of me.

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The Garden had a boundary

Consider the garden in Genesis. Before anything else happens in that story, God places the man in a garden “to work it and keep it.” Not to make himself available to every creature that might wander past its edges. To tend a particular plot of ground, with boundaries, for a particular purpose. The garden has a perimeter. That’s not incidental to the story — it’s foundational to it.

We don’t talk about that part very often. We talk about love, about service, about laying down our lives for others, and rightly so. But we skip past the equally biblical truth that stewardship requires boundaries. You cannot tend a garden you have no fence around, because you cannot tend ground that anyone and everyone is free to trample.

This matters enormously for women like the ones I write to and walk alongside — women in the second half of life who spent the first half believing their worth was measured in availability. We answered every call. We absorbed every crisis, especially our adult children’s crises, long after those children were technically adults capable of handling their own lives. We called it love. Sometimes it was love. Sometimes it was something closer to fear — fear that if we stopped being endlessly available, we would stop being needed, and if we stopped being needed, we would stop mattering.

Infinitely available?

But here is the harder truth I’ve come to over the last several years: God did not design you to be infinitely available to everyone. He designed you, like that first gardener, to tend a particular plot — your own life, your own gifts, your own unfinished work — with boundaries clear enough that something can actually grow there.

This is not a popular message in certain corners of Christian culture, where self-sacrifice gets celebrated without much nuance and boundaries get quietly coded as selfishness. But I want to gently push back on that coding, because I think it has cost faithful women dearly. A woman with no boundaries isn’t more faithful. She’s just more depleted, and depletion is not a fruit of the Spirit.

Depletion is not a fruit

Galatians gives us the actual fruit we’re meant to be cultivating: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Notice that last one. Self-control implies a self with edges — a self capable of saying yes to some things and no to others, deliberately, rather than dissolving into whatever anyone else needs in the moment. You cannot exercise self-control over ground that has no fence.

I think often now about what it means to live your own life as an act of faithfulness rather than an act of rebellion. For so long I conflated the two — I thought that attending to my own calling, my own writing, my own rest, was somehow a betrayal of the people who needed me. But what if tending your own garden well is precisely how you become capable of truly loving the people around you, rather than resentfully serving them from an empty reserve?

Building fences

This is the work I find myself doing now, in this second half of life: building fences, not walls. A wall keeps people out entirely. A fence simply marks the ground I am responsible for cultivating — my time with God, my creative work, my marriage, my own unhurried thoughts — and lets everything outside that fence be someone else’s to tend, including, gently, my adult children’s own lives.

There is also a practical dimension to this that I think gets overlooked in our spiritual conversations about boundaries. A fence has gates. It is not a fortress with no entry point — it simply has gates that you control, rather than gaps that anyone can wander through unannounced. You decide when the gate opens for your adult children’s genuine needs versus their preference for your old availability. You decide when it opens for ministry, for friendship, for hospitality, and when it stays closed so the ground inside can rest and recover. A gate you control is not a failure of love. It is the structure that makes sustainable love possible across decades rather than a few exhausting years.

You have permission

If you find yourself in this season, exhausted from tending every garden but your own, I want to offer you the same permission I eventually gave myself, the permission I wish someone had spoken over me decades earlier: you are allowed to build the fence. You are allowed to tend what you’ve actually been given. That is not selfishness. That is stewardship, and stewardship has always been holy work.

Let’s Discuss: Where have you confused being available to everyone with being faithful to God?

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