I have been thinking a lot lately about my own, very real, limitations.

I have a certain level of capacity.

After 51 years, I have a pretty good sense of when that capacity is tapped out.

Often, that occurs before I wished it did.

I used to think I should do more. 

Rest less and do more.

I wished I could be more like "so and so" who has more capacity, more energy, less limitations ...

But I can't.

All I can do is be me, limitations and all.

There is great freedom in this knowledge,

if you accept it.

I love how Gordon Smith puts it:

"We cannot be all things to all people. We need to choose, and our choices will mean saying no to some alternatives and eagerly embracing others. This may sound easy, but I know from my own inner journey through midlife that it can be characterized by much inner turmoil."

Then, Smith quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"There is a time in every person's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel or nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given to him to till."

Smith ends this train of thought with this statement:

"... this is the heart of the matter - to accept our limitations and to take responsibility for our giftedness."

I think the question we all must ask at some time in our life is:

What is the plot of ground God has given me to till?

And, if this is that plot of ground,

what do I need to say no to

in order to devote myself to the work God has called me to do?

If we don't ask ourselves these questions,

we risk

skimming the surface of much of life,

and especially our vocation,

and that, 

to me,

is a tragedy.