Five Days to a Healthier Spiritual Lifeናሙና

Consider Your Limits

You have been given a particular body with talents, gifts, and privileges to steward. But you have also been given limits. Limits are a mercy to remind us we’re not the Creator. I can’t run near as fast as I’d like and get cranky when hungry. When I live in a way that over functions, I test my limits instead of believing that true rest is in embracing creaturehood. The limits of everyday life remind us we’re not the one who sustains life. Trusting we don’t have to produce to be loved or accepted by God, we can stop trying to earn both from others by living outside our design.

It’s one thing to agree with all these things in theory regarding our limits; it’s another thing to live out that agreement. In what ways are you aware of your limits but still continuing to test them? In what ways are you refusing to live within the boundaries of being human, trying to live instead like a machine? What needs to change so that you can live what you say you believe about being a creature and not the Creator?

Perhaps there’s a reason you’re not living your limitations the way you should: you haven’t actually considered them. After all, no one wants to feel inadequate. Whether through our bank account, physical fitness, health, our kid’s accomplishments, or what we can provide, we don’t like to feel limited. The engine of consumerism and the champions of human ability don’t want you to feel limited. They don’t even want you thinking about your limitations, actually, which explains (at least in part) why most of us don’t often think about them. But limited is exactly what we are.

As a discipline, regularly consider your limited, finite nature. Ponder passages like Psalm 103:13–14 regularly, meditating on its teaching that indeed “we are only dust,” but also that God is our compassionate Father who takes care of us in our frailty.

As you ponder your finite nature, consider the responsibilities, roles, and relationships you hold daily. Name the pressures you feel each day, the demands on your attention and time. Pray and seek to discern what is an expectation from the world versus a gift from the Lord.

Taking time to name our limits in this way helps us come to terms with our creaturehood and drives us to depend on God, the Giver of help and life. There are limits to every part of our life. As you practice the discipline of regularly considering them, you’ll grow in your ability to see them less as killjoys and more as protective borders of human flourishing.

You’ll grow into a Christian who believes the grass truly is greener inside God’s good design.