The Fence That Belonged to No One

In 1961, Peter Fechter was a young bricklayer in East Berlin who watched the wall go up brick by brick — some of which he himself had laid. For months he told friends he was "thinking about" crossing to the West. He attended the mandatory party meetings, nodded at the right moments, then whispered his doubts to his sister over kitchen coffee. He lived in the impossible middle, loyal to neither side, belonging to nowhere.

When he finally attempted to cross in August 1962, the hesitation that had defined his life defined his death. He was shot near the top of the wall and fell back into the death strip — that barren no-man's-land between East and West. For nearly an hour he lay bleeding, visible to both sides, claimed by neither. East German guards would not retrieve him. West Berlin police could not reach him. The middle ground he had occupied for so long became the place where he perished.

Elijah stood on Mount Carmel and asked Israel the most dangerous question in Scripture: "How long will you waver between two opinions?" The people answered with silence — the same silence that always fills the space where conviction should be. They had been living in their own death strip, burning incense to Baal on Tuesday and singing psalms to Yahweh on Saturday, belonging fully to neither.

The God of Elijah does not share the fence. He asks for the whole heart or nothing at all.