Healing Over Fixes: Why Limitations Are Not Curses
By Annie Horner, MA Living Wholehearted Professional Counseling Associate
“You break, I fix”: a lifesaving store if you ever, like me, have accidentally swam with your cell phone in the ocean, dropped it on a bike ride, or had your water bottle unknowingly spill over it after it fell to the bottom of the trunk of your car (Anyone else? Bueller… Bueller?)
When something of value breaks, we are filled with hope from this one thought: “Maybe someone can fix it.”
What about the most valuable things in life, such as our families, relationships, and deepest hurts and longings? These are things that a tray of rice can’t work its magic on; and yet still the hope rises: “Can this be fixed? Can it go back to how it was?”
It is not wrong to want things to be fixed. It shows that we can tell what is wrong and that something is broken. Yet what I want to suggest is that perhaps it isn’t God’s dream for our life to live in a “fixed” story, but a healed one.
Join my theological imagination of picturing the disciples watching their friend and Messiah carrying a cross through blood and hurled insults. As their window of tolerance moves into hyperarousal through fearful heartbeats, they cope in different ways: some run, some watch in horror, some stay by the tomb grieving. While the story was about to change in a way the disciples could not imagine nor perceive, they sat in a three-day tension of a broken story: Jesus was gone, and they were left vulnerable.
What I want to suggest is that God didn’t “fix” the story through Jesus’ resurrection; in the book of Acts, while Jesus is alive, the disciples are still without his physical body. They are no longer sitting at a table with him, or traveling from town to town with him like in the years prior. The life they knew for the last three years was never going to come back the way they knew it. What changed is that the disciples learned the limitation they feared - Jesus’ death and being “without” him - was actually God-designed, and did not need to be feared at all. The story they wanted to run and hide from (see John 20:19) became the story they embraced with renewed purpose, relationships, and power… not despite the loss, but because of it.
This is not a fixed story; this is a healed story.
I want to propose that the greatest stories that God has for you and for me are not what we can accomplish, but instead where His grace can carry us through the blessing of limitation. We are not cell phones waiting to be brought back to self-sufficiency with new batteries and uncracked screens. God did not say to Paul “let’s get that thorn out of you” or to Jacob “what’s with the limp?”. Instead, He intended these limits to be embraced so that His love and sufficiency could be known, and drive us to one another in a deeper way.
As we enter into the fall and winter months, I invite you to end the war with your limitations, putting down your weapons of pep talks, shame, and striving. Instead, may we know this beatitude: blessed are the limited, for they will know the grace and sufficiency of God.
I invite you to reflect on the following:
What limitations are you facing?
What are your God-given needs that have been ignored?
How might your limitations demonstrate the provision and sufficiency of Christ in your life?
Maybe our limitations were never meant to be fixed, but met through the provision of God and the relationships around us. May we embrace our limitations with faith: we are not problems to be fixed, but people to be healed. And the healing may be in the very story we never expected.
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“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she went running to Simon Peter and the other disciple.” John 20: 1-2.
“But he said to me: ‘my grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness [limitations]. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses [limitations], so that God’s power might rest on me.” 2 Corinthians 12: 9
You can reach Annie at annie@livingwholehearted.com to inquire about individual coaching or leadership consultation opportunities.