Calling & Limitations
“Limitations don’t have to be losses; they can be the avenues to our flourishing. This is particularly true if we stay focused and creative within their boundaries, if we care for and cherish what’s inside them.”
Suffer Strong, “Redefining Calling: The Path Before Us”
We feed the metrics of passion, productivity, education, and opportunity into a manmade algorithm in hopes of determining our God-made calling. We project our life purpose according to our strengths and freedoms, rather than our weaknesses and constraints. While this line of reasoning is understandable, it could lead us to see only liabilities in our limitations, rather than opportunities for God’s creativity.
As we walk ever deeper into the upside-down kingdom of God, we’re noticing a pattern:
those for whom God writes the most amazing stories are often the least amazing characters—on the surface, that is.
The Bible provides an overwhelming number of examples.
Rather than appointing any one of the strong, clever men in the land, God selects David, an adolescent shepherd and the youngest of eight sons, to be king of Israel and Judah.
After being abandoned by his family and sold as a slave in a foreign land, God raises up Joseph to become one of the most influential leaders of his day in Egypt.
While Jesus could have rightfully crashed to earth on clouds of fire, he quietly enters history through the womb of an unwed teenage refugee named Mary. God prefers to work within limitations, it seems.
In fact, Jesus himself is the most powerful embodiment of fulfilling a calling because of limitations, not despite them. The eternal, universal force of the Christ was compressed into a human womb and constrained to the body of a baby, then a child, then a man. Jesus was cut off from his heavenly home place, limited to communicate with language, bound to live alongside small-minded and small-spirited people, and executed under the application of a flawed litigation. Within the most formidable of limitations, Jesus not only flourished but lived the single most extraordinary life in the human story. He was able to engage with humanity and die for humanity only because he embraced his humanity—the ultimate constraint.
This realization has transformed our lives: limitations and calling are not opposing forces at war with one another. Rather, they are positive and negative spaces, dancing together to form a complete design.
Because we are friends of God, our literal limitations prompt us to release our ideological limitations of what is possible. While remaining vigilant against delusion or self-serving, we’re choosing to redefine and expand our idea of worthiness into world-changing territory. We’re surrendering control to the true Author to write His good stories for shepherd boys, slaves, single moms… and stroke survivors.
A Benediction: God, tell me who I am and show me the work I’ve been given. Grant me the courage to lean into my assignment wholeheartedly, instead of wasting my time comparing myself to other people. Equip me to take responsibility for doing the creative best I can with my one and only life. (inspired by Galatians 6:4-5)
