Learning To Love My Limits

Learning to Love My Limits

I don’t want a supersized Diet Dr Pepper, thank you. A medium, heavy on the ice, will do just fine. And I don’t covet any more space than the 1,457 square feet I happily call my own. I don’t need a newer car, more clothes in my closet, or more things to fill my rooms. I have enough. More than I need.

It’s not that I am unambitious. My head is still turned by beauty of all sorts. I hope to keep being asked to do meaningful work that matters to me. I hope to write more books, teach more lessons, craft more poems. I hope to grow (in depth and not just breadth) my circle of friends. Plenty of longings still tug at my heart—but they don’t break it. Not anymore.

Every now and then I wonder what it might be like to have my own place in the country to get away to, although it’s perfectly nice to be loaned the keys to someone else’s now and then. And when people ask about the children they assume I have, I choose to remember the ample opportunities God gives to practice my own improvised brand of mother love.

Finally, after so many years of wanting, seeking, and striving—I’m learning to love not just my gifts but my limits. There are things I cannot do and may never do. Things I don’t currently have and may never have. I could focus on these and become resentful, or I could consider how those limits refine my desires and my heart for the better.

G. K. Chesterton writes, “The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect.”^a

There is no shame in admitting that I am kept from some things and lacking others. In all things I have more than enough. I have him and this life that he has given. And I am certain I will never come to the end of the fullness of either.

He makes peace in your borders; he fills you with the finest of the wheat.

Psalm 147:14, ESV

^a G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (Simon and Brown, 2010), 87.