In God’s creation, there are literally uncountable stars (well an estimated 100 billion), most larger than the sun, stretched out over “supposedly” an unimaginable 48 billion light years of space. God also has an infinite capacity for beauty for what appears for beauties sake only. Witness the blooming flowers in the desert “where no person will ever go” or see the intricacies of an unknown bug deep in the Amazon rain forest. God dwells outside of time. “A thousand years is as one day” to God. The Trinity has never had a beginning of existence.

But you and I have limits as we have all experienced. Our life is limited to the point that God often refers to mankind as a vapor vanishing quickly and the place that we live remembers us no more. We have been placed here by God with only a little time, resources, and abilities. In our modern world, we also know how limited our attention capacity is for all that is going on. I feel this deeply having seven children, being responsible for one third of America’s land mass at my my job, and occasionally trying to put out an article or two about having time to connect with God.

However, we are his workmanship and created in his image. We have all been given a chance to worship him and bring him glory. The question of the day is not how many resources we have to do this, but how do we deal with our limitations, sins, our bad circumstances and still be part of God’s workmanship? How can we bring him glory, and how do we be that sweet “aroma” that God calls us to be?

We might answer this question better if we change perspective. Our competitive prideful nature views life as a contest with winners and losers (lots of losers). But that view of life is wrong unless you are an adult male grizzly bear looking to eat the latest cubs born to prevent competition and pick up an easy meal. It is not a Christian view. There just may be a better metaphor to use. I believe this is it. We are in essence to be a living poem. Arguably America’s greatest poet Robert Frost said to the effect, if you want to be brave write poetry. Great poetry creates, or points to, something different than the parts that made it up. The poet embraces limits in words, and often the  structure of those words, to eventually transcend those limits creating something greater than the parts.

We make a mistake in spending our time complaining about “the words” we have been given and the limits we have been transcribed because they have made it harder for us to win (whatever that is). Instead of taking on our task in the limits we have been given with great zeal, we often wonder why and complain bitterly we too cannot share in this infinite capacity of God and also own “the cattle on a thousand hills” to be used at our descretion.

But God wisely has not given us that. Instead, he has given us limits and asked us to take the resources given us and use them for his work, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, something wonderful is created. A “new creation” reborn and showing courage and spirit despite the good or bad hand dealt us we transcend, even in the smallest of ways at times, the daily grind.

This article is not to casualty push aside the tragedies, unfairness, and the pain of life, or say they simply they do not matter. Evil is not just a plot line to be overcome. We do not just need to put on a happy face and suffer and say God has willed it for me and there is no hope. Christianity believes anything but that. Jesus understands the tragedy of a fallen world full of evil. No one knows and understands pain more than Jesus. But Christianity acknowledges that we were not made for a limited fallen world and left in sin. We were made to glorify God in heaven, and despite the fall, because of the work of Jesus and redemption, we can be bursting at the seems of our limitations to praise and glorify him. The devil’s job is to get you to quit, grumble, and shrink away from your limits in fear.

Check out Jesus Parable of the Talents in Matthew.

Doug

The words of British poet Robert Abrahams say it well, “For some men die by shrapnel, And some go down in flames, But most men perish inch by inch, In play at little games.”  Our goal is to identify the little games and put a stop to them and put the right weight on the right things.