I like to feel useful, to be involved, to make a difference and so I push myself, sometimes to the limits. I let people use me, my house, my car, my guitar, my time, my energy because God has given me endless grace and I have no right to hold things my own. Then sometimes I do more than I can, and I stretch thin. *
God is limitless. I don’t understand that, but I recognise it and appreciate it when I reach my limits. Once again, a summer of activities has left me frazzled, finding simple tasks complicated. I make excuses like, ‘I can do everything, just not everything all at once!’ but God has no limits. I get tired, I can’t manage my e-mail and my phone drives me nuts, but God’s ear is limitless. He can listen to billions of voices all at once and distinguish yours individually and carefully craft a response designed just for you.
God’s forgiveness is limitless. There’s nothing that you can’t come back from, there is no-one too far to reach, He made an endless decision to remember your sins no more. I try to forgive, I try to hold people up and bring them back, but I lose patience, or I lose the strength to keep up with them. God’s patience is almost limitless. I say almost because His justice is limitless and must be satisfied and someday His patience will run out, but a God who is slow to anger is fascinating and one that I need.
You see the one thing I seem to find about me that is limitless is my failure. I try hard, but I still let people down. I want what is right, but I still abandon it for what is easy. God’s love is limitless and no matter where I am or what I do He does not reject me or abandon me. His presence is limitless. All of creation tells of how far He extends, that the heavens stretch to hold Him, even the darkness is as light to Him.
My hope is limited by my experiences, or at best, my imagination, but He who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine has a hope for us that extends beyond life and death and time and eternity. His hope for you is limitless.
My energy and life is limited, I can only achieve so much and I can only run so long but when the sun has stopped shining the heavens and the earth will still be lit by a God whose power is never consumed, because His power is limitless. I can’t explain to you how limitless God is, but whatever your image of God is, he is bigger than that. Whatever your experience of God is he can be closer than that and more powerful than that. Praise be for our limitless God.
*This reminds me of a couple of things, like when Bilbo is telling Frodo in Lord of the Rings that he feels thin, like butter spread over too much bread. Or when in physics you would test the elastic limit of a rubber band, and you would stretch it in a way that it would never go back.