Limits

Everytime I read what he's written it's so challenging! Pulled out of context a little, but to see the full context, go to his blog. I've taken some of what he's written because if you're like me, you often don't click on the links people put on their blogs. If you do, go read the rest of this on his blog - Restlessness: Not Acknowleding Our Limits Can Keep Us From Focusing On Anything Permanent

Here's what Rhett Smith says:

When Our Desires Come Into Conflict With Our LimitationsThis is where the rubber meets the road. Each one of us has lots of things we want to do with our lives. There are lots of things we want to accomplish each day…but those desires, and our passions can often hit limits. Last year I wrote a post, Limits and Potential: Living Free Within That Tension, which was a reflection on this issue as formulated by Parker Palmer in the book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. Palmer puts it this way:

“Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people who work daily with the things of the world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can and cannot do–and if she fails to listen, the outcome will be both frail and ungainly. Engineering involves more than telling materials what they must do. If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failure will go beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.”

God has created us with many desires and passions for our lives, but the reality is, is that on this side of heaven, many of them will not come to fruition. That feeling can leave us in a constant state of restlessness, unable to truly commit to anything permanent, therefore, leaving us constantly in a state of not acknowledging our limits, and with an inability to focus on anything for a long period of time.