Shaking Fists and Limits
I’m currently reading Jen Wilkin’s book None Like Him: 10 Ways God is Different From Us (and why that’s a good thing). This book was given to me last summer by one of the sweetest Mother/Daughter duos after we finished working on their wedding together, and for a while, I thought I had lost it. Miraculously, it just found its way back to me a couple of months ago and when my eyes fell on the cover, I distinctly remember a whisper across my heart that said “you’re going to need this.”
As I opened the book along with a strong pull to the book of Hebrews, the very first chapter is about how the Lord is Infinite. Jen talks at length about our obsession as humans with measurement, and the motive behind it. She says:
“Measurement is the millenia-old obsession of the limited human, who, perceiving his own limits, seeks to transcend them by quantifying his world. That-which-we-can-measure we think we can to some degree control.”
I don’t know about you, but I wrestle with feeling out of control, particularly when it comes to watching other people I love suffer or experiencing loss all together. On a less grandiose level, I struggle with the curve balls of the every day too, and that which does not fit in my vision for how our day was supposed to be. Walk through enough days of that, and it turns into a fist-shaking spirit full of questions that just seem to have no answer about “why is life this way?” or as my sweet daughter said walking into her Grandmother’s funeral last week, “I just didn’t think this would happen.”
Truthfully, God doesn’t mind our shaking fists, and He welcomes our questions. However, the answer is that He is God and we are not. We are frail. We have limits. We are finite. He is holy. He is limitless. He is infinite. There is part of me that even types that out and has a strange vision of an overlord showing me who’s boss. Thankfully, that is quickly dispelled with the vision of a Man reaching down to pull up a trembling woman off the street as they listen to the sounds of rocks falling to the ground, and He clothes her with the forgiveness of sins. (John 8:1-11).
He does not delight in seeing us at the end of ourselves, but He made a way for us to experience the depths of Him because “without Him we can do nothing.” (John 15:5). I felt drawn to this book because I’m not sure I have ever started a year off more aware of how frail the human life truly is, and my heart desperately needs to tether to the fact that there is nothing frail or finite about the Lord. How kind of Him to start me off in this very spot, to see my limits as another way He wants to love me and teach me more about how trustworthy He truly is with our life now, the lives of those we love; all of us, forevermore.
Let’s wrestle it out friends. He can take it. It is worth the risk to see more of Him and how HE sees our limits, and to glimpse the depths of what all He longs to give us that has no end.
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