Limited

Fruit by Diane Newcomer

Unlimited

Together we're unlimited

Together we'll be the greatest team

There's ever been

Glinda - Dreams, the way we planned 'em

If we work in tandem

There’s no fight we cannot win.

(From Defying Gravity in the musical Wicked.)

Limited

Apart from the amazing musicality of Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel in the song Defying Gravity the lyrics are perhaps my favorite in the musical Wicked. It speaks to a deeper longing.  The longing to have everything work out the way we plan, and all our fights won.  To defy gravity, the natural rules that are set in place.

I too want to defy gravity, but right now my life feels limited.

My heart longs for unlimited.  I want to have dreams the way we planned them and every fight won. 

But my body is limited. And I can’t wish or dream myself into an unlimited world.

My heart and body ache. (I literally ache.) But I also ache for what I know deep inside is right and whole. A world we don’t live in now.

Longings

I long for perfect. 

I long for a world lost long before my time and yours. A world without broken bodies. 

No shame. 

No fear. 

No death or disease. 

The perfection our hearts were created to experience.

Now we live in the after bite. 

One decision.  One bite and imperfection.

The in between. 

The messy middle years between death, and sickness and disease and Jesus defeating sin with the hope of Heaven and waiting for perfection to return.

My heart longs for my limits to be erased.  I long for the limits of a chronic condition to be erased.  I never imagined at 17 when I was diagnosed to be dealing with the same blood sugar issues and hormone struggles 20 years later.  But here I am living with a chronic condition that impacts my every meal and ability to show up the way I want to for my friends and family. I want to wake up full of energy with a fresh clear face and have a breakfast full carbs and cheese. But I’m limited. And I know I’m not the only one. We all have limits to what we wish our bodies could do.

I desire to keep my human limits. I don’t want to be God or like God in unlimited knowledge. (I have thoughts to share on our digital age and the unlimited amount of knowledge we have access to in later posts.)

But I desire to live without the limits of a world forever changed by death, disease and decay.

When Life is not Unlimited

As, Kate Bowler reminds me frequently on her podcast Everything Happens, “life is a chronic condition.”  We all have some sort of chronic condition or will develop one.  Even if we don’t like to talk about it, we have to decide our responses to living in a world that is not perfect and broken.

How am I going to respond to this beautiful, painful life?

How are you going to continue on with the limits of life?