Embracing Limitations

David Lose again finds the most fascinating analogies for use in the church that helps move the church into new understandings about what the church should be like.

Phil Hansen is another example of how we in the church need to look at ourselves. Hansen makes a comment towards the end of his TED Talk that caught my attention. He says as he destroyed each project he learned to let go... let go of outcomes... let go of failures... let go of imperfections.

I thought of how we in the church struggle with letting go... letting go of outcomes... letting go of failures and imperfections... after-all we have to get it right the first time. Why do we in the church have such a hard time letting go and letting God work For Hansen... while having a limitation that he thought was life ending. He discovered that he had life and life abundantly.

Below is what David Lose wrote about embracing limitations and enjoy the video at the end.

See You Out on the Road


Faced with a condition that made his hand shake and thereby seemed to destroy his dreams of being an artist, he took his neurologist’s advice to “embrace the shake.” When he did, he eventually discovered a number of remarkable ways to make art that didn’t compensate or overcome or even transcend his shaking but rather employed it to lead him to new creative ventures and vistas.

What Hansen discovered was that far from reducing creativity, limitations actually increase it. Limitations set boundaries, close off the obvious routes forward, and invite – actually force – you to think differently.

In one sense, as Hansen explains, this feels like “thinking outside the box.” But in another, perhaps deeper sense, it’s really about thinking inside the box, the box of your limited self and resources. And that’s the thing: all of things we need to create – resources, abilities, time – are not inexhaustible and therefore set limiting factors that can deter us or, with a bit of grit, wit, and perseverance, can spur us to think differently and move to a new, heretofore unimagined space.
It will be easy to see this as a “if life gives you lemons…” kind of story. But it’s much, much more: it’s about accepting limitations – all of our limitations – not only as part of who we are but also as the source of what we can do, see, and be. In order to embrace our limitations we need to be ready to experiment, to fail, to keep working even when it feels fruitless, and in all these ways eventually discover something new.

This video is about art, and it’s about creativity, but it’s also about life. What might your or my life look like if we saw our limitations as invitations instead of impediments? And what might our congregational life be like, I wondered as I watched, if we saw our limitations also as gifts from God, as the places where the crucified God shows up to invite us to something more than we’ve accepted and also to accompany us as we journey into – not just through but actually into – our limitations to discover more abundant life?