I suddenly found myself in a season of grieving the loss of capacity.
Six years prior, I was organized, efficient, and capable, working in management at a high volume veterinary emergency and specialty hospital. My husband and I were accepted to serve with our sending agency two weeks before I found out I was pregnant with our first son.
I started school again about a month before he was born and completed my coursework the week our second son was born thirteen months later. Then we moved four times across three states in three years during a grueling partnership development journey that lasted almost five years.
We were already dealing with burnout by the time we reached our assigned field, outside a refugee camp in sub-Sahara Africa, where we had no indoor plumbing and cooked every meal over charcoal. A year into our journey, we found ourselves disappointed by our reality, barely capable of keeping up with the bare minimum to survive each day, fumbling our way through a culture and language that somehow felt more foreign than it had the day we arrived.
I looked into the mirror to see a tired, frazzled thirty-something woman in a struggling marriage who couldn’t seem to get the parenting thing right, with zero capacity to engage the culture she’d been sent to. I looked in the rear-view mirror at who I had been six years prior and wondered where that woman went. She could have handled this, I thought to myself.
I sat with the heaviness of our reality, crying and shoveling spoonfuls of Nutella into my mouth when suddenly, it struck me — Jesus chose limited capacity to save the world.
He came into the world as a baby boy — a tiny, vulnerable bundle, completely dependent upon his parents. And although His body grew into the body of a capable man, He was still man. And although He remained fully God while fully man, He experienced the limitations of reality as a human. He experienced the need to eat, drink, and sleep. Perhaps He experienced skinned knees as a child, slivers as He learned carpentry from Joseph, and sore feet from walking all day during His earthly ministry.
And yet this choice, this plan, resulted in the gift of eternal salvation to all who believe (John 3:16, Ephesians 2:8). With this comes the abundance of life (John 10:10) and the hope of something greater to come (1 Peter 1:3-6). And because of this choice:
God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11, NIV)
Interestingly, from my limited, human perspective, it looks like God again chose limitations by commissioning the Church — full of humans like myself — to continue His plan of redemption across the globe. God is so great that He could snap His fingers at any time and this would all be over, but He hasn’t. In fact, He says His power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).
My finite mind doesn’t understand this. Nor does it understand why He would come as a baby. But in His sovereignty, which knows no limits, He did both of those things.
Whether you are in a season of grief or a season of dancing, let’s celebrate the beauty in the tiny, vulnerable, bundled baby Boy we call Jesus, Immanuel — God with us — whose changed capacity forever changed the world.
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Candice traded cool rains in the Pacific Northwest for dry heat in East Africa, where she serves alongside her disciple-making husband. She loves homeschooling her two boys and baking sourdough in her charcoal oven. She shares her thoughts and stories on Instagram and at Joy from Fear, hoping to encourage readers to cultivate joy that overflows from fear of the Lord.
