“I just don’t want to be hampered by my own limitations.” ~ Barbra Streisand
Limitations are seen by many as negative and as something that stops us and allows us to go no further. If that is how we view limitations, that indeed will be the case. However, consider the following: a soldier who loses a limb in battle, a worker that loses sight in an accident, or a person that is crippled in a gruesome fall. Each of these people could view their limitation as stoppers.
What if they didn’t do so? What if, instead of viewing their limitations negatively, they viewed their limitations as challenges to rise above? In their own ways, they could be as fully functional as they hoped to be by embracing the challenge and learning new ways to deal with daily situations in life.
A year ago, I stumbled upon a video of Manami Ito playing the violin (go to YouTube and do a search on her name). She has played the violin since she was six. However, when she was twenty, she lost her entire right arm in a car accident. She thought she would never play again. She locked herself indoors for a year. But her mother told her that she hoped, one day, that Manami would play for her again.
With a prosthesis attached to her shoulder, Manami plays once again. She has engineered a way for the bow to remain on her violin and with commands from her shoulder, her prosthesis moves the bow across the strings to make the most wonderful music.
Manami could have said that she would never be able to play again and fulfilled that prophecy by never picking up a bow and trying. Her mother, though, got her to think past limitation to challenge and hope. Sometimes a little hope is all that it takes to get us moving again.
FAITH ACTION: Do not focus upon you limitations. Instead, ask God for the grace you need to learn from your limitations.