What Limits?

I met a new friend recently. Sharp as a tack, as they say. Disarming on the outside, fierce on the inside, and from what I saw, someone who clears the bar of being the hardest working person in the room. Her own daughter described her as someone with no limits. If she sees a need or sets a goal, she does whatever it takes and almost wills the thing into existence.

I'm blessed to have several people like that in my life. People with a gear most others don't have. People who, instead of making excuses, create new paths. They produce at an extremely high level, not out of greed, but for accomplishment, significance, and a desire to honor the gifts God gave them. Not for self-promotion, but for irrational generosity.

They see a problem or an opportunity and focus only on how will we do it, ignoring the why we can'ts. They say yes to God first, and then ask Him the questions.

History has a few of these people too.

Several miles from where I grew up in Massachusetts, a girl named Clara Barton was born in 1821. She was painfully shy as a child and barely five feet tall as an adult. Nobody would have picked her out of a crowd as someone who would change the world. When the Civil War broke out, Clara didn't wait for permission. She gathered supplies, much of it with her own money, and hauled them straight to the front lines. At Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history, she was kneeling beside a wounded soldier when a bullet tore through her sleeve and killed the man she was tending. She kept working. The soldiers started calling her the Angel of the Battlefield.

After the war, she learned about the International Red Cross while in Europe and came home determined to bring it to America. Washington told her no. Then no again. Officials worried about foreign entanglements and saw little need for it in peacetime. Clara saw the need and refused to accept the excuse. She wrote, lobbied, and kept knocking. In 1881, at 59 years old, she founded the American Red Cross and led the organization into her eighties. Clara didn't know how it would all come together. She only knew it should. And she refused to quit.

Breakthrough is on the other side of quit. Quit is birthed out of excuses. And excuses are the fruit of a lack of confidence, vision, desire, or character.

But I want to be careful here, because "will it into existence" can sound like it all depends on us. It doesn't. Paul puts it this way:

Read that again. Infinitely more than all we ask or think. Unimaginable! God isn't limited by the size of our dream. If anything, we limit ourselves by dreaming too small. And notice where the power is: at work within us. The grit, the conviction, that extra gear you see in people like my new friend, at its best, is God's power moving through a willing heart.

That's why the order matters. Say yes first. Ask the questions second. And let the glory go where it belongs.

So dream for a minute about what's possible. In your life, on your team, in your family. Identify the best that can be done, not the best that you know how. Test it with prayer. Ask whether it aligns with God's will and whether your motives are true and right. And then go after it with conviction, hard work, irrational love, and teamwork.

The breakthrough is right there in front of you. Go get it. With God, there are no limits.