The Freedom of Limitations

[Kalli Amstutz is a contributor to the Gender Matters blog, the new voice of the Gender Matters Task Force at Northwestern College in Minnesota.  The GMTF is made up of college students who live out and promote the traditional biblical view of gender roles in the home and church. - David Kotter]

In a culture that celebrates freedom, limitations are not warmly welcomed. Telling a child he cannot stay up past nine evokes anger similar to the woman who is told she cannot do everything a man can.

In her book Let Me Be a Woman, Elisabeth Elliot points out, "There are those to whom being a woman is nothing more than an inconvenience, to be suffered because it is unavoidable and to be ignored if at all possible. Their lives are spent pining to be something else."

We naturally prefer to be in control and determine who we are and what we do. When another puts limitations upon us we feel belittled and trapped. But what if those limitations were put upon us by the One who created us? Our Creator God designed with purpose, though to us it may at times appear an inconvenience.

Elisabeth Elliot explains:

Every creature of God is given something that could be called an inconvenience, I suppose, depending on one's perspective. The elephant and the mouse might each complain about his size, the turtle about his shell, the bird about the weight of his wings. But elephants are not called upon to run behind wainscots, mice will not be found "pacing along as though they have an appointment at the end of the world," turtles have no need to fly nor birds to creep. The special gift and ability of each creature defines its special limitations. And as the bird easily comes to terms with the necessity of bearing wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear the bird - up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom - so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling - wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.

When we align ourselves with God's design we must accept certain limitations. I am not a man. As simple as that sounds, the implications are real and if I try to live like a man I will be greatly disappointed. We are only satisfied when we live in such a way that fulfills our purpose. Only then will the Creator be glorified and will we be truly free.