Embracing Our Limitations
Phil Hansen’s ten minute TED Talk is as important as it is poignant.
Faced with a condition that made his hand shake and thereby seemed to destroy his dreams of being an artist, he took his neurologist’s advice to “embrace the shake.” When he did, he eventually discovered a number of remarkable ways to make art that didn’t compensate or overcome or even transcend his shaking but rather employed it to lead him to new creative ventures and vistas.
What Hansen discovered was that far from reducing creativity, limitations actually increase it. Limitations set boundaries, close off the obvious routes forward, and invite – actually force – you to think differently.
In one sense, as Hansen explains, this feels like “thinking outside the box.” But in another, perhaps deeper sense, it’s really about thinking inside the box, the box of your limited self and resources. And that’s the thing: all of things we need to create – resources, abilities, time – are not inexhaustible and therefore set limiting factors that can deter us or, with a bit of grit, wit, and perseverance, can spur us to think differently and move to a new, heretofore unimagined space.
It will be easy to see this as a “if life gives you lemons…” kind of story. But it’s much, much more: it’s about accepting limitations – all of our limitations – not only as part of who we are but also as the source of what we can do, see, and be. In order to embrace our limitations we need to be ready to experiment, to fail, to keep working even when it feels fruitless, and in all these ways eventually discover something new.
This video is about art, and it’s about creativity, but it’s also about life. What might your or my life look like if we saw our limitations as invitations instead of impediments? And what might our congregational life be like, I wondered as I watched, if we saw our limitations also as gifts from God, as the places where the crucified God shows up to invite us to something more than we’ve accepted and also to accompany us as we journey into – not just through but actually into – our limitations to discover more abundant life?
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This reminds me of a recent presentation where Rev. Steve Bouman used 2 Kings 4 (Elisha and the Miraculous Oil) as an example for struggling churches. Elisha asks the widow, “What do you have in your house?” and the suggestion for churches was to do the same so that instead of looking at what we don’t have, we should look for ways to be more creative with what we do have. How can we better use what we have “inside the box”?
I have often thought the same thing. Why don’t churches “inventory” who is there and find out the abilities (and disabilities) of those people.
Wouldn’t this bring people closer together? Wouldn’t it open up opportunites for them to help each other in practical ways?
When Moses protests that his limitations make him unsuitable for the call before him, in Exodus 4 God says, “What’s that in your hand?” and instructs Moses to make use of what he already has.
WOW! TED never ceases to amaze me!
Unfortunately this video is not captioned, making it useless for a large number of people.