A Very Exciting Box arrived at my door late yesterday morning. I even recorded myself opening it. (You can watch here if you like.)

Exciting why?

Not simply because of its contents, though I was delighted to see them, but because the contents symbolized something important to me.

Symbolized what?

Not my worth (though I did come to recognize our worth in God’s eyes more deeply through working on the contents of the box).

Not my hard work (though there was plenty of that).

But a truth that has come to mean a lot to me in the past two decades: The Mighty Creator who spoke the universe into being delights to work in and with and through limited human beings. And to do it not by overriding our limits, but by joining himself to us in our smallness.

A Season That Matters Today

The world goes round and the calendar turns and in a week and a half, incredible as it may seem, we’ll be entering the season of Advent once again. It’s a season that matters today, and every other day of the year.

Why?

Let’s start here. When you consider Advent, what words come to mind?

Here are a few of mine:

• Coming (2000+ years ago and in the future)
• Preparation (for the One who comes)
• Journey (on a donkey and closer to the heart of the One who comes)
• Busyness (sadly), but also trying, in the midst of the busyness, to intentionally choose. . .
• Stillness
• Attentiveness
• Making Room (especially since I first read my all-time favorite Advent devotional last year)

I probably would have given a similar list several decades ago, and it remains true today. But there’s this word, too, which until the last few years wasn’t on my list, but increasingly I understand as a central part of the beauty and mystery—and invitation—of Advent:

• Limits.

As Bette Dickinson beautifully describes,

“In the incarnation, . . . [God] chooses to take on the limits of our humanity. And invites Mary into partnership by dwelling within her limits. . . .

He doesn’t ask her to do miracles.

He doesn’t ask her to get a theology degree. . .

He doesn’t ask her to be Superwoman and save the world. He has plans to do that himself.

God invites Mary into partnership by asking to dwell within the confines of who she already is.”

Bette Dickinson, Making Room in Advent, p. 36-37

In the incarnation, the God who can’t be contained within the cosmos stoops and curls and enters the small space of a virginal womb as a human embryo, gradually growing there, slowly stretching the woman’s body and soul to make space for the growing life and love of God.

This is still how God comes, the Almighty God (con)descending to live and work and play and pray in and through us, his love poured out into the world through our frail but willing hands and hearts.

I saw this truth most clearly one Christmas when I stayed with a friend nearing the end of her journey with cancer, and a dear older friend cooked and brought an entire turkey dinner for us to share:

“The miracle of incarnation, of Word enfleshed, is repeated now in bright eyes and wrinkled hands stirring gravy, in fingers massaging a scalp through baby-fine hair, in bruised and wasted flesh opening itself in sacred and unashamed nakedness to receive help. I wonder if they felt the quickening like I did. We weren’t just on holy ground, we were holy ground, Christ alive in us.

The Word became flesh. And since that time, the Word has not stopped wearing flesh in the world.”

Carolyn Watts, Risking Rest, p. 205

Learning to Live Within Limits

Learning to be comfortable with having limits and living within them has been a long journey for me, and one that continues.

As a child, I misunderstood the Sunday school song which insisted that J-O-Y meant Jesus first, yourself last, and others in between. I heard it to mean that I could—and should—disregard my own needs and limitations. And that it would lead not to illness but to faithfulness and joy.

And as a doctor-in-training, I was greeted on my first night of obstetrical call with the reminder, “Eat when you can, sleep when you can, pee when you can.” That tip of the hat to the essential biological demands of the doctor’s body was necessary but hardly sufficient advice amidst the reality of the 24-hour shifts: twenty minutes of sleep, a bagel or granola bar tucked in a lab coat pocket to eat on the run, and jokes in the operating room about needing an indwelling catheter because our bladders were about to burst.

Our world, and even the church, often press us to do more, try harder.

Hear me carefully: There’s a rich goodness in giving our whole selves and working with all our heart. But to work with all our heart in the truest sense requires us to live in a way that allows us to recognize that we have a heart. And that our heart needs tending in order to stay open and give in a way that comes from love rather than working for it.

Here is profound grace, showing us this truer way: God gives himself fully, loving us with his whole life and self. And he does it not by overcoming our limits, but by respecting and entering them.

Here, tucked in a virgin’s womb, woven into the flesh of God become an embryo, is the astounding truth: limited humanity is given the awesome privilege of carrying God himself within us and bearing his life into the world.

The truth is echoed all through Scripture: God doesn’t ask us to bake twenty loaves, only to offer him the five that we have.

He doesn’t ask us to create wine, just to do the work of filling the jars with water when he asks.

Not Just Compensation

God doesn’t just compensate for our limits, multiplying our efforts and being strength where we are weak. He uses our limits.

As I wrote in Risking Rest,

“Here is surprising grace, for the limits I have so long and so fiercely resisted turn out to be as great a gift as my strengths—greater, maybe—guiding me into the unique shape of life I am meant to live and helping me stay close to the One who wants to be strength in my weakness as I co-labor with Him. ‘There is no such thing as a non-handicapped life,’ Jurgen Moltmann declares.  And that is grace.”

Carolyn Watts, Risking Rest, p. 239

As we approach this season of preparing for the coming of God among us, may we be given the grace to celebrate our limits, and to begin to experience them as a place God comes especially close.

___________________

If you’d like to soak further in this truth of God coming to live in our limited places, you may enjoy these resources:

• Risking Rest: Embracing God’s Love Through Life’s Uncertainties. (This book enters the world this week— concrete evidence of God meeting me in my own limits over the past twelve years of writing and several decades of living this story. Download the first chapter free or order the book here.)
• Bette Dickinson’s free 12 minute meditation on the topic of God meeting us in our limits
• . . . or one of her Advent resources (which, I’ve just learned, are all 25% off through Tuesday, Nov 28th with the coupon code MAKEROOM)