Our Limits Are Good
As I look back at my early years as a mother, I’m not sure where the years went. They consisted of endless diaper changes, middle-of-the-night feedings, and the bleary-eyed making of breakfasts for picky toddlers. I felt boxed-in, wondering how my new mothering life fit with all the hopes and dreams I’d planned.
The sudden constraints of this season weren’t to be kicked against, but rather received gratefully—an invitation into the good life I said I wanted. A life of rich meaning, simple joys, and a connection to community and place, with a God who would walk beside me through the sleep deprivation, uncertainty about my calling, and questions about what to make for dinner. The good life seems to usually come this way, through a forging and pruning process. It comes through letting go of what I thought I wanted and following God’s story instead—one that didn’t go up and to the right, but down, into the desert.
This disorientation wasn’t abandonment. It was love. When we run up against our limits and are tempted to forge our own path instead of trusting God, we’re faced with a question: will we submit to God’s given life for each of us, learning the lessons of less? Ultimately, my limits asked me questions about lordship: Was God in charge or me?
Our Limits Are for Our Flourishing
Limits aren’t always about loss—they’re also about fruitfulness. About learning how the narrow way is good. But, in our drive to measure success or achieve recognition, we’ve missed how limits are good—and they have been, even from the beginning. In the loving care of God, the world came to be with boundary lines. The sun was to rule the day and the moon the night. Planets had paths in which to travel. Fruit came from particular seeds and the earth had cycles of fallow and flourishing. Boundaries—limits of season, natural laws, and even human relationships—were created as “good,” to give form and order to a world that was previously formless and void.[1]
Adam and Eve were given to each other to live within the bounds of a covenant. Their work in the world, from stewardship of the earth to parenting, was to be lived under the good limits of God.
But, after the fall, we have grown suspicious of limits. It’s fascinating to note that one of the words we use for sin, transgression, comes from the roots “cross” and “beyond” (trans) and (graderi) “to walk” or “to go.” The first sin was going beyond the limits of our good God. Limits were designed for us to grow in intimacy with God and each other. Yet, while we transgress the limits of our bodies, time, attention, and places, we’re also invited to swerve back into God’s guardrails and find our hope, rest, and purpose there.
Mothering, then, can be an invitation to notice and name our limits. We are limited in body—an infant needs feeding every three hours, we use our bodies to shield and comfort little ones, or we find our bodies bending down to listen and disciple. We have limits of time—our lives feel ruled by little emotions and nap times. We have limits of calling—we pour into our children for years, often without measurable success or results. Yet all of these limits show us the way. Rather than limps holding us back, our limits are gifts of self-restraint to steward.
Limits invite us to love.
Jesus Wears Our Limits
Ultimately, we do not rise and fall based on how well we do or do not embrace our creaturely limits. The good news is that Jesus has gone ahead of us. He has chosen to enter the world small, through the womb of a young girl. He took on our fragile nature, and we often see him respecting the limits of time, attention, and calling as he went off to prayer when it was still dark, called disciples to himself, and lived an itinerant life. In the garden, he succeeds where our first parents failed: he does not cross the boundaries of the Father’s will, but submits himself to those limits. And in that act, we obtain the salvation of God, a God who entered into the limits of his creation so that we can taste that spacious life. Jesus received the “no” of God the Father so we could always have his “yes.”
The creaturely limits we experience in motherhood—that we never seem to have enough time, emotional capacity, care, or control even over our own bodies—cause us to cast ourselves on the kindness of Jesus, the one who is Emmanuel, God with us.
So when we fail in our tasks, when mothering exhausts us, when we respond harshly—may we be reminded that our limits always bring us back to rest in our unlimited God.
He invites us, then, to live between his good boundary lines so that we, too, can be living stones, built into a house,[2] for the good of our children and the world. Our limits—rather than something to control or ignore—are precisely the guardrails we need to get there.
Our limits are good.
[1] Genesis 1:2
[2] 1 Peter 2:5
