Fighting When I Should Be Sleeping

It is by fighting the limitations, temptations and failures of the world that we reach our highest possibilities."
                                                                           Helen Keller
                                                                           Recorded by Lucille, December 27, 1930

It's about two in the morning and I am wrestling.

I am immersed in Ethiopia in my head. The house is quiet and the sounds and people and demands of the world as I've known it are all snoring softly in their beds.

The world as I've discovered it, is wide awake.

Ethiopia is eleven hours ahead, so my friends working across the Atlantic are busy tackling the sounds, people and demands of their world. Stephne might rescue a baby this day, or train an Ethiopian social worker. The doctors and staff at Soddo Christian Hospital may remove a tumor or repair an intestine. They will certainly save a life. They face a different sort of health care crisis there. Sam has returned to the children's home from his visit back to the states, his heart full to bursting and tearing as it's affections take root on two continents, for the children he's lived with these past sixth months have taken up residence in his heart.

In my mind I'm in Ethiopia because a few things happened to me when I visited there last November.
          *One, I left a part of my heart there.  How could I not? I met dear friends, hugged countless strangers, ate lamb cooked over a fire with kocho bread, listened to the joy-drenched voices rising from barefoot coffee farmers. I fell in love.
          *Two, I discovered that there was a part of my life I hadn't yet lived, would have entirely missed had I given into the pressing limitations, the perpetual temptations and the whispers of my past that worked as a team to try and talk me into staying put, right here in my cozy house. I would have missed it! I would never have known that I could participate in something that much bigger than my day to day life. I would have missed the opportunity to see the handiwork of a huge God as he faithfully revealed himself in Ethiopia.
          *Three, I realized that my personal "highest possibilities", well, I haven't attained them yet! Not by a long shot! But, I'm thrilled to know in my heart and by my experience that limitations, temptations and failures are lies but the fight is real and the joy is found in beating the lies down just enough to glimpse the higher  things.

There are failures of the world.

There are failures of my life and even of this day.

Sometimes the limitations, even the very small ones, when stacked upon each other like so many bricks, can seem to form a mountain insurmountable. Much like the one made of dirty dishes in my kitchen sink.

They'll wait for tomorrow.

For tonight, I'll keep working on the website ideas for New Covenant Foundation, I'll look at the pictures  and remember that the failures of the world have built a mountain of poverty in places like Ethiopia, and it takes me, and you, and a few other willing folks, to knock it down.

Skirting on Edges

“Monotony skirts the edge of boredom and limits begin to seem like limitations."

– Daniel G. Mason, “Dilemma of American Music, And Other Essays”

Have you viewed the limits in your life as limitations? I have.

Have you looked around your life, looked at your daily list, or simply looked at the weather beyond the window glass and turned sighing while the doors of promise quietly shut, one by one?

Have the limits of the day-to-day determined the course of your life, the quality of your existence or the brilliance of your relationships?

Have you chosen to be steered along by the plodding monotony of your perceived limitations rather than be surprised by your ability to syncopate, to change things up just a little?

When Mary Lennox (The Secret Garden, Burnett) discovered a key that turned the rusted knob sequestered behind tangled vines, she pushed open a door that led to a world of… limitations. Yep. An overgrown mess of a garden, overrun with weeds and plants left to go wild awaited her on the other side of that door. It was work, work and more work. It was labor she was unaccustomed to in the dirt of a subject she knew nothing about.

She was limited by the scope of the reality of the world beyond the silent gate.

She was limited by her size, age, knowledge, experience.

She was limited by what others thought she should, could, and mustn’t do.

She was limited by dawn and sunset.

Yet the invitation, carried in the scent of misted moors and small peat cottage-fires, drew her out of the monotony of the life that was already hers in her uncle’s mansion.

And so, she got her hands dirty.

She made new friends.

She changed a life.

And she changed hers in the process.

What limits are you facing today? What monotonous cacophony is holding you in one place, afraid of the possibilities of your limits? Will they be limitations or a doorway to something that is not yet, but promises to be: beautiful.