Limits

Athletes will tell you that working out is not the most important part of training. Recovery is the number one cause of athletic injuries is the lack of recovery time between training sessions.

Let me repeat this because it’s so counterintuitive—recovery is more important to athletic performance than training is. Your body needs to rest and repair between periods of exertion. By not letting each of the muscle groups rest, a person will reduce their ability to repair. Insufficient rest also slows fitness progression and increases the risk of injury.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This a physical expression of a reality that applies to your heart and soul in serving Christ as well. We could probably predict who’s going to burn out and who’s not by looking at their recovery practices. But most people don’t take their recovery seriously. They’re simply shocked and heartbroken when their soul suddenly gives out. How will you build recovery into your life? What’s your plan?

In his book Making Sense of God, Tim Keller notes that when the national anthem is sung at sporting events, the cheering begins on the line “o’er the land of the free.” The singer quite often extends that line with a lengthy high note. Keller writes, “Even though the song goes on to talk about ‘the brave,’ this is an afterthought. Both the melody line and our culture highlight freedom as the main theme and value of our society.”

But true love imposes limits on our obsession on freedom. The film Secondhand Lions captures this well. In a scene near the end of the film, a small fatherless boy who has been abandoned by his mother to be raised by his crazy great-uncles. The boy tells one of his uncles, who is prone to depression and has contemplated taking his own life, that he cannot do that because he, the small boy, needs him. “You're my uncle. I need you to stick around and be my uncle.” The faithfulness of love will shape—and constrain—the freedom of love.

Science has come very far in understanding how the human body works. But scientists admit understanding the human brain is still in its pioneering stage. God’s marvelous creation is still a mystery. The ultimate question in neuroscience is: How does the brain work?

Neuroscientists have made considerable progress toward understanding brain architecture and aspects of brain function. We can identify brain regions that respond to the environment, activate our senses, generate movements and emotions. ... But we don’t understand how their interactions contribute to behavior, perception, or memory.

Stanford neurologist Charisse Lichtman, offers a picture to clarify the problem:

But if I asked, “Do you understand New York City?” you would probably respond, “What do you mean?” There’s all this complexity. If you can’t understand New York City, it’s not because you can’t get access to the data. It’s just there’s so much going on at the same time. That’s what a human brain is. It’s millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There’s no point when you can suddenly say, “I now understand the brain,” just as you wouldn’t say, “I now get New York City.”

Modern people like to see freedom as the complete absence of any constraints. But think of a fish. Because a fish absorbs oxygen from water, not air, it is free only if it is restricted to water. If a fish is “freed” from the river and put out on the grass to explore, its freedom to move and soon even to live is destroyed. The fish is not more free, but less free, if it cannot honor the reality of its nature.

The same is true with airplanes and birds. If they violate the laws of aerodynamics, they will crash into the ground. But if they follow them, they will ascend and soar. The same is true in many areas of life: Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.

Years ago, a series of studies set out to determine how a fence and a boundary affected the behavior of children in the playground. The researchers constructed a playground with no fences. During the experiment, the children stayed in the center—almost in fear—and never ventured out beyond the playground structure. Then the researchers put up a fence. Immediately, the children's behavior changed. Instead of fearfully staying in the center of the playground, they wandered with freedom all the way to the fence, exploring and enjoying the entire space.

The researchers concluded: "The overwhelming conclusion was that with a given limitation, children felt safer to explore a playground … With a boundary, in this case the fence, the children felt at ease to explore the space." In other words, fences brought freedom. It was the absence of fences that created fear and apprehension.

If you see a large sailboat out on the water moving swiftly, it is because the sailor is honoring the boat's design. If she tries to take it into water too shallow for it, the boat will be ruined. The sailor experiences the freedom of speed sailing only when she limits her boat to the proper depth of water and faces the wind at the proper angle.

In the same way, human beings thrive in certain environments and break down in others. Unless you honor the given limits of your physical nature, you will never know the freedom of health. Unless you honor the given limits of human relationships, you will never know the freedom of love and social peace. If you actually lived any way you wanted—never aligning your choices with these physical and social realities—you would quickly die, and die alone.

You are, then, not free to do whatever you choose … You get the best freedoms only if you are willing to submit your choices to various realities, if you honor your own design.

The paper used for standard letter writing and school essays is 8.5 x 11 inches, or 93.5 square inches. Most teachers require one-inch margins for class papers. That's the standard we've become accustomed to seeing. But have you ever stopped to consider what percentage of the page that margin occupies? When I ask people, most answer anywhere from 15 to 25 percent.

But a one-inch margin on a standard sized paper is 37.4 percent of a page's area. More than one-third of the page is given to space. And that's just around the edges. When you double-space the lines of text, a majority of the paper is blank.

The empty border helps us focus on the printed text. It creates a comfortable feel for our eyes. Stylish magazines help readers focus on the text and images by using large amounts of margin on each page. Sometimes we use even more margin in catalogs and on blogs.

Sometimes people think that margin (sometimes called "white space") is wasteful and inefficient. They pack as much print as possible on the page. But have you ever seen a page packed with text from top to bottom and side to side? You'll get tired looking at it, even before you begin reading it.

Possible Preaching Angles: Prayer; Quiet Time; Sabbath; Spiritual disciplines—Margins and space in our lives, blank spaces on our calendars, Sabbath time, can give us room to deepen our relationship with God and others. Margin has substance, and it intersects with how we live (our heart), how we think (our mind), and how we act (our hands). We focus because there are margins.

In his TED Talk, "The Paradox of Choice," secular psychologist Barry Schwartz claims that many of us live by this unspoken but "official dogma": maximize your happiness by maximizing your individual freedom. And according to Schwartz, "The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice."

Schwartz points to his local supermarket as an example—a place that offers 175 different kinds of salad dressings. Even our personal identity has become a matter of choice. "We don't inherit an identity," he says. "We get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be."

Schwartz ended his talk by pointing to a picture of two fish in a fishbowl as he said:

The truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction … Everybody needs a fishbowl … The absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster.

Possible Preaching Angles: This would also work well as an object lesson illustration with a real fish in a fishbowl.

Your mom made you take your vitamins. Without vitamins, your body would develop skeletal defects, eye impairments, dermatitis, anemia—in essence, your body would begin to break down. But taken in high doses, Vitamins A, D, B6, and iron are highly toxic. Too much iron in our systems can cause liver failure, low blood pressure, depression, coma, and death. According to a study at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., iron supplements are the number-one cause of death from "accidental overdose" in children.

In the same way, sometimes "work for God" can create an "accidental overdose." If you are running hard for God, overextended, neglecting family and friends for the sake of ministry or church work, some people will celebrate your dedication. Isn't it good when we give it all in service to others? But too much of a good thing can harm you and those around you.

On July 24, 2013, a train carrying 218 people in eight carriages derailed in northwestern Spain, killing 79 people and hospitalizing another 66. Shortly after the wreck, the driver, Francisco Jose Garzon Amo, told officials, "I can't explain it. I still don't understand how I didn't see …. I just don't know." He said the journey was "going fine" until the train hit a curve. At that point Garzon said to himself, "Oh my God, the curve, the curve, the curve. I won't make it."

Despite Garzon's initial confusion and surprise, there is a simple explanation for the crash. Video footage revealed that the train was going as fast as 119 mph before it hit the deadly curve. That's more than twice the speed limit for that section of the track. So it wasn't just the speed that caused the accident. It was the combination of the speed and the location of the track. The train was designed to reach speeds of over 130 mph. But Garzon, who was a 30-year employee of Spain's national rail company, simply ignored the boundaries in which those high speeds were to be used.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) God's Commandments; Obedience—God has laid down the track for us so we don't wreck our lives or the lives of other people. We ignore his speed limits at our own peril. (2) Sex; Sexuality—Our culture needs to hear how the message of speed limits applies to our sexuality. (3) Limits; Balance; Rest—Ignoring our God-given limits for work or success or productivity will only lead to wreckage.

The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article about William Lane Craig, the man they called "Christian philosophy's boldest apostle." Craig has traveled the world debating many of the world's most articulate atheists. The atheist Sam Harris said, "Craig is the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists"—which is probably why the atheist Richard Dawkins refuses to debate Craig.

But the story of how Craig became a brilliant scholar and debater reveals the sovereign work of God in the midst of our weaknesses and limitations. From birth he has suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome, a neuromuscular disease that causes atrophy in the extremities. He walks with a slight limp, and his hands often look as if they're gripping an invisible object. Growing up, he couldn't run normally. "My boyhood was difficult," Craig said, "Children can be very cruel."

Since varsity sports weren't an option, he joined his high school debate team. Initially, he wasn't interested in spiritual issues, but he started reading the Bible, and the Jesus he found there took hold of him. Craig explained, "For me it was a question of personal … commitment: Was I prepared to become this man's follower?"

During college he continued debating and searching for his calling. Not until years later, though, after establishing himself as a philosopher, did he start to debate and defend his faith in a public setting. It came as a welcome surprise. He said, "I was just thrilled to be able to [use debates] as a means of fulfilling this vision of sharing the gospel."

For sixteen years, Lo Scalzo served as a photojournalist for U.S. News and World Report. He covered assignments in more than 60 countries, winning countless awards and accolades from his peers. He just couldn't stop moving. "I'm something of a travel addict," he admits in his memoir Evidence of My Existence, and photography was his way to satisfy that addiction. But his addiction came with a price. His frequent and compulsive travels abroad left his wife a stranger to him. While he was in Baghdad covering the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she was heading to the hospital with her second miscarriage. Lo Scalzo hated himself for what he felt was desertion, so even when he was given the opportunity in 2004 to cover John Kerry's presidential campaign—quite an honor—he declined. He writes in his memoir:

[T]his time, for the first time, it was so easy to back out—not a guilty concession but what I truly wanted …. [H]ow silly this effort. This stress. Seventeen years of it. Not time wasted but time overplayed, trying to inflate a finite ability through sheer force of will.

He later adds toward the end of his memoir what ultimately led to his stepping away from his frantic pace:

How to stop moving? It was about accepting a simple truth: In the world of photojournalism I would always be a man of minor accomplishments. But in the field of fatherhood—to one little boy, at least—I had a chance to become legend.

Once we were able, and now we're not. You know what you used to be able to do. I remember somebody at the Sunday school picnic who had been quite an amateur baseball pitcher in the early days--little league champs, you know. He hadn't played for about ten years, but he knew how to pitch.

All the kids are playing, and along comes Father. He shows how he can still put them in low and away and still get in a few curve balls. Oh, he finishes in triumph. All the kids think he's great. "I showed the kids a few things. The old fella hasn't lost his touch."

Then he wakes up the next morning, about seven o'clock. He reaches up his arm. "Ahhhhh!"

His wife says, "What's the matter?"

"Don't touch me. Don't touch me. My back's gone. Uh, it's my spine. It's broken. Get the doctor, the police, the ambulance. Call 911. Bring everybody. I can't move."

"What's the matter?"

"I think I'm paralyzed. It's my back. It's my shoulders. It's my neck."

Then the wife says lovingly, "It's probably the baseball."

"Don't be silly. I've played baseball all my life."

"Well, you know, dear, you did go out pretty strong."

"I pitched six innings once without a break. O-o-h-h-h, don't touch me." Then eventually he crawls out of bed, and the wife's right. You see, there was a time when he was able, but the body is just telling him he's not able now.

The marvelous thing with God is that down through the centuries he was able, he is able, he will always be able. I may be disabled, but he is able. I may be incapable, but he is capable.

If we don't know ourselves and what shaped us, what neutralizes us, and what our limits are, we invite disaster.

I take great comfort in God. I think He is sometimes much amused at the human race, but on the whole He loves us. He would never have let us get at the match-box if He had not known that the frame-work of the universe is fireproof.

I took my two youngest kids to the Batavia quarry on my day off a week ago. It has a beautiful sand beach with shallow water. Or you can go out into the deep water and there are some high dives and slides. But if you want to go in the deep water, you've got to get a deep-water pass.

At the beginning of the year, my 7-year-old son, Andrew, got his deep-water pass, but it was not something he did easily. He's a great swimmer; he just doesn't like the pressure of having to do something in front of a couple of lifeguards.

That day, he said, "Dad, I don't have my deep-water pass. I'll just hang out in the shallow water." I said, "A break is coming up. Go over and tell the life guard you'll swim for a new deep-water pass in a few minutes." He looked at me as if to say, "You've got to be kidding. I'm going to do this again?" But there was no argument to be had. When the break came, he swam for his deep-water pass, and he got it easily. The rest of the day, we had a ball together.

So there are times when it's appropriate to demand something of our kids. But good dads also know their kids' limitations. Good dads also take into account a son or daughter's age or temperament or peer pressure or physical health or school struggles or popularity issues. Do you think that our Heavenly Father is any less sensitive than an earthly dad who weighs these factors when dealing with a child?

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.