Honoring our limitations

If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in creative tension between our limits and our potentials. We must honor our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in a way that fulfill the potentials God gave us. We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer – and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives. (Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak)

It seems that we spend part of our life unaware that we have limitations, then we spend another part discovering and fighting them. Gradually you get to a point where you learn to embrace your limitations and honor them as part of who you are. Paul speaks of this when he wrote about embracing his thorn in the flesh. You see echoes of this all the way back in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve aspired to break past human limitations and share in God’s limitless knowledge. I’m certainly in the phase when I’ve realized that no matter how hard I fight, I’m stuck with certain limits. Its humiliating to realize that my limits are not a problem for other people – they can do with ease what I can’t. This Saturday, I was exhausted and ended up going to bed early. I’ve had to check to see if my shingles were coming back (don’t think so! yes). After a crazy week, I pay for my lack of rest. It’s freeing to stop fighting this and other limitations and to begin to embrace them instead, realizing that we were made to live within limits. When you honor those limits, life takes on a whole new sense of wholeness.