I am limited. I’ve always known that instinctively, but recently a new reality has begun to grip me: I am limited . . . by design.
I wake every morning to these limits:
- I have only twenty-four hours in my day.
- My body will require sleep again tonight.
- I don’t know what tomorrow (or even today) holds.
- I can’t be in two places at once.
- Perhaps most humbling—I simply can’t do it all.
These limits—marks of being human—often leave me feeling like a failure. To avoid that feeling, my impulse is to ignore my limits, acting as if they don’t exist. I’ll squeeze as much out of those twenty-four hours as I can, function on as little sleep as possible, and plan, manage, and control as much as is humanly possible.
But what if limits don’t simply define what I can’t do, but what I wasn’t designed to do?
When I ignore my limits, I run the risk of missing an important truth. Kelly Kapic, in his book, You’re Only Human, offers this simple reminder: “We are, by God’s good design, finite.”1 Finite is a word for us to recapture. It simply means, “having limits or bounds.” Its opposite is more familiar—infinite—which, in short, means limitless. This word can only rightly be applied to God. He is the only One who is limitless. We, on the other hand—human beings created by God—were designed with limits. We were made to need our Creator and Sustainer. In the beginning, God created limited human beings and he said that it was good.
Limits are still good. The way that we live within them has been broken and distorted by the fall, but limits are good and for our good. Psalm 16:6 paints a picture of the good design of limits:
“The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.”
Psalm 16:6
Pleasant Places
The boundary lines of my life—the limits that shape my world and my days—are a beautiful inheritance. They are God-given, his perfect, good gifts, designed for me. The psalmist describes his place within those limits as pleasant—I picture the green pastures and still waters of Psalm 23.
This may sound like an idealistic picture of limits. Yes, that’s the framed picture in the gallery, but on an ordinary Wednesday, a still-life portrait of limits includes an incomplete task list, an extra cup of coffee, and an endless number of open browser tabs. It looks far more like a finger painting than a Monet. The gap between the psalmist’s painting and my still-life portrait shows my broken relationship with limits. Gently, like a good Shepherd, the Lord has been leading me to examine that relationship and to reclaim my limits as pleasant places, boundary lines that he has drawn. Living within my limits means humbly remembering that he is God and I am not. He is infinite and I am finite. I am a needy, dependent creature, a truth that’s hard for me to admit.
My limits are good gifts because they keep me near my Creator.
Humbling as they are, limits offer an invitation to draw close to the One who created me. Yes, I am needy, but in my need, I have always experienced the provision of God. My limits point to all the ways he is limitless. He’s the eternal God, unlimited by time (Deut. 33:27). Unlike me, he never sleeps (Ps. 121:4) or grows weary (Is. 40:28). I can’t search the depths of his wisdom (Rom. 11:33). I can’t flee from his presence, no matter how far I run (Ps. 139:7). He is able to do more than I could ever imagine (Eph. 3:20).
Friend, your limits are the boundary lines designed to keep you near your good Shepherd. They are the fence around pleasant places—green pastures and still waters—where he leads you and is near you. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be sharing bits of my own story of learning to live within these boundary lines. I invite you to join me in discovering the joy of communion with our limitless God, not in spite of our limits, but by living within them.
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1 Kelly M. Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2022), 12.