On Your Limitations: A Letter to My Children

Do not be ashamed of your limitations.
Don’t be grieved because you have weaknesses and gaps.
Do not worry that you are very, very bad at some very good things.

Here is why. Color theory.

Let us take yellow, for instance.

Yellow functions best in a piece of artwork when yellow is yellow with all of her heart. Yellow is warm. Lively. Penetrating. She is the color of the morning sun and wild honey. VanGogh chose her alone to represent Divine Love.

Yet, what if yellow envies the purple? What if she watches some program on the BBC and begins to yearn for a poetic tranquility like that character named Emmaline or August Rose who wears empire-waist dresses and wanders dreamily through the moors?

What if yellow begins to wonder if not being purple is why she has been so lost and so lonely after all? And what if yellow, in her despair, attempts to soak up a little violet into her blood? What if broodiness is in fashion this year, and yellow feels grossly out-of-date, and so she washes herself over in heliotrope?

She will turn a muddy brown, that’s what. She will lose herself, and improve herself nothing whatsoever in the process.

If yellow despises the way she was made, if she feels she is too bright, too loud, too vibrant, if she attempts to become her own opposite, she will lessen her value, not increase it.

Should yellow grow enamored with thistle, or orchid, or mulberry, let her. For she was made to love them. She was made to stand near them, to look over into them and revel in their beauty. She was made to shine in her golden glory and press it up against the lavenders and the indigos. She was made to contrast with them, and to enhance them.

But she was not made to be them. She was made to thrive in the thin and mighty range of strengths given to her alone.

Yellow, if she knew herself as we know her, would simply throw her arms wide like a child running, trusting that her greatest limitations were also the underpinnings of her greatest loveliness.
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“I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.”

George MacDonald

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Rebecca Reynolds

In the summer months, Rebecca lives on the back of a painted turtle who wanders the night sky collecting moon fizzles. She is the author of the acclaimed book, Courage, Dear Heart: Letters to a Weary World, and can be found at her website, Thistle and Toad

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