March 11, 2021: Listening for Limits 

Text:  

Exodus 20:1: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. 

Meditation:  

The Ten Commandments have been wisely described as “an owner’s manual for being human.” It doesn’t list things we can’t do; it lists things we shouldn’t do—things that, whenever we do them (sometimes, even when we think about doing them), diminish our humanity. If you think about it, they are wise limits on us—”the wise constraints that make us free.” If we listen carefully to God’s call, we hear not only the fullness of our possibilities but the caution of the reality of our limits—the limit of our imagination, of our reasoning, of our imperfect will. If we deny the reality of our own limits and imagine ourselves to be limitless, we set ourselves up as God—which can never lead us to a truthful place. 

Questions: 

• When have you send God calling you to an awareness of your limits—and to a wiser sense of your boundaries? 
• Have you ever had an experience of doing something that went beyond a limit you should have respected?  
• Our culture teaches us to regard the idea of limits as diminishing or demeaning. How do you resolve the tensions between what the faith teaches us and what the culture around us regards as “normal”?