Embracing Your Limitations: Sara Hagerty

Sara: How do I navigate knowing if God actually wants me to push here, or if I'm to step back and submit to the limitations? The invitation is into the deeper conversation with God. So many of us react to what's available to us and to the dreams we've always had without actually pausing and going, what do you have for me in this moment?

Because sometimes God may say, “I've given you a talent. I want you to invest it. And that investment is going to take a ton of sweat and tears and go for it.” And sometimes the Lord may be saying, “You've been pushing this thing over and over and over again, and I'm trying to whisper in the background. It's time to let it go.”

Shelby: Somewhat anxious, always authentic, this is Real Life Loading...

I'm your host Shelby Abbott. Okay. So today is part two of my time with author and speaker, Sara Haggerty. Last time Sara shared some really provocative thoughts from her new book, The Gift of Limitations [Subtitle: Finding Beauty in Your Boundaries]. We left off while talking about how her definition of success means growing in her understanding of God's love, not a common definition of that word.

Well, the world definitely has a different meaning to success than that. But Sara says, “There's a downside to what culture communicates.” So let's hop back into my conversation with Sara Haggerty.

Sara: I think God sometimes breaks us with failure, and I think sometimes God breaks us with success. Because I know a lot of people who have been very successful, like say in the writing world, in their writing careers, who get to a point where everybody just keeps wanting the next thing, or they get the next thing and deep down inside they are sick at heart going, I got here and this actually isn't what I wanted.

Shelby: Yes. You hear stories about that with celebrities or athletes that like, when, you know, we talked about football earlier.

Sara: The day after the Super Bowl. How does that really feel?

Shelby: Day after the Super Bowl.
Sara: Or maybe a week after the Super Bowl. How does that really feel?

Shelby: Well, I watched this documentary on Netflix about Swamp Kings, the Florida Gators, when Tim Tebow was there.

Sara: Uh huh.

Shelby: It was a really good documentary, but it talked about their coach in the locker room after they won their second national title in the locker room as everybody's celebrating his texting recruits for the next year.

And I was like, isn't that a picture of just never being satisfied? He could not even celebrate, because he had to think about next year.

Sara: Yes, and I think that's the thing. I do write about this in the book, the power of being present to where we currently are. I think sometimes we reach for presence, like, let me use my phone last. Let me take more opportunities to really fix my mind on what's in front of me so I can be present.

I actually think being present is a byproduct of deeply receiving our limitations as a gift. I don't mean just like you turn this podcast off and you go, my limitations are a gift. Let me convince myself. I mean, like stepping into a process with God of going, teach me, help me to understand that the limitations You've given me are a gift.

I think one of the most beautiful byproducts is the ability to celebrate the current moment.

Shelby: Yes.

Sara: The ability to be really present with what's right in front of you and not having your eyes fixed over the fence line. I think some of the downside to this dreaming that we do is that we're actually living the fruition of some of the dreams of God's heart for us right in front of us, and we're missing them, because our eyes are always over the fence.

Shelby: Yes, that's really true. And I think one of the things that is a huge struggle with that are the elements of comparison, envy, and jealousy. How do those things, envy, jealousy, factor into what you're talking about here? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sara: Yes. I think that they happen a lot of times undetected. Let's just take social media, for example. I'm going to speak to women, because that's what I understand more, but you might feel really great about your eyebrows. Laugh with me, Shelby, I know this probably isn't something you can totally identify with.

Shelby: I do feel great about my eyebrows, I do.

Sara: You might feel really great, but then you get on social media and you see somebody else's eyelashes are amazing and, oh, look at their facial structure, like, ooh, did they have Botox®? I don't know, but they've had to have some work done.

So, just in a purely physical way, it's like something that you might really love about your body or your physique is under constant comparison, because of the phone that we have in our hand, and we just do it unthinking. I'm not even talking about like career path or goals for life or family or relationships. I'm just talking strictly physical for women, that's a big thing.

Ultimately what it does is it takes a our mind away from the conversation with God, “What are You doing in my life, and how can I join You with what You're doing?” To strictly looking at how can I improve what I see in front of me and how can I get the best of that? That game is exhausting.

I think for so many of us, I would say even people in their twenties and thirties, there's a physical reality that's happening. People are getting sicker. There's a lot more happening in people's bodies than happened in our parents generation when they were at those ages. I think a lot of it is because there's a deep tiredness that we have from pushing ourselves constantly past our limits.

Shelby: I remember my doctor telling me when I was really deeply struggling with anxiety, he said, “Stress and anxiety, they will kill you.”

Sara: Whoo!

Shelby: They will manifest in ways that causes just huge problems in your physical body. Like your organs, your skin, your muscles, like it gets people get tension headaches.

Sara: That's a smart doctor to lay that out like that.

Shelby: Yes. I was like, okay, that's helpful. Now I'm more anxious about the fact that I'm anxious. [Laughter]

Sara: I know, right?

Shelby: But yes, it was one of those things that actually looking back on it now, it's really helped me to know that, “Oh, this isn't just like a mental health thing.” But your mental health is connected to your physical body.

Sara: Absolutely.

Shelby: Another element that I wanted to talk about too with you in an online culture of, you kind of talk about this in the book, life hacks, trendier clothes than ours, physical things like thinner waistlines, faster and easier communication and shortcuts for basically everything.

How in the world can you convince someone or even yourself that limitations are your friend and not your nemesis?

Sara: Yes, we're always optimizing, and there's so many opportunities to optimize. I think actually it maybe needs less convincing than we think, because I think most people are hitting their physical realities that are limiting them.

Shelby: There bumping up next to it.

Sara: They're bumping up against their fence line. This is where I would go back to say, “I think God is working a story in each one of us.” But the reality is there's probably most listeners are experiencing, in some form, insomnia or anxiety or headaches or body aches or injuries. I think our bodies are telling us a story and God is using those to say, “This optimization that we've all been working towards maybe isn't God's design.”

Sure, I don't want to toss all that. I love that there's hacks. I love that I can order my groceries to my doorstep. That feels amazing and like such a gift right now. But at the same time, I think we have optimized ourselves into a reality that actually isn't God's design.

It makes me think of, I ran a race actually back in Charlottesville, Virginia, a long time ago. I'm a runner, who is far beyond her peak now. But at that time that I ran the race, I thought I could actually win it, because of a time that I had the year before. It just was a local race. I trained all summer long to win this race. Because it was local, I thought I could win it. And so I trained. I had my splits on my hand. I knew the times that I needed to get for each mile to win this race. We show up on race day and race day is ten degrees hotter than the summer that I trained, which is very unusual. So it's really hot.

Shelby: That's bad, yes.

Sara: It's bad. Then as I get up to the starting line, I see that there are some Olympic trialers who have jumped in on this race. They're not just the locals.

Shelby: Boo.

Sara: Boo is right. I'm not going to win this race, right?

Shelby: That's not fair.

Sara: But my mind was I was so set on winning, and I was set on my splits. I didn't go, I need to adjust because it's ten degrees hotter. I was so set on winning several miles into the race. My body is giving off all these warning signs, slow down. You can't keep this pace. I ignored them all to the point that I actually had a heat stroke, which can be fatal, right before the finish line.

What's so interesting as I look back and what happened there, it has become for me like this picture of my life. That God gives us lots of warning signs going, you weren't meant to run this fast. You weren't meant to optimize in this way over and over again.

We all have them in our life. Every single person listening has some form of stress or anxiety or insomnia or headaches or body aches telling them they’re trying to push past the God designed limits in our lives. Some of us just have to or Type A personalities have to have a heat stroke before we go, “Oh, shoot.”

Shelby: I wanted to say that reading your book has made me super self-reflective about what are some of those areas in my life where I feel like maybe there's warning signs that God is giving me that I don't need to push past. I'm in a spot too with other areas where I'm like, I don't know what God wants for me here, and I'm bumping up against fence lines. But at the same time, I'm wrestling with the Parable of the Talents, you know. God has given you a certain amount and you need to invest it for the Kingdom, and I'm trying to figure out the nuance of where do I need to steward and shepherd my gifts the best way that I can. Nobody else is responsible for that except me.

Sara: Mm hmm

Shelby: Where are the warning signs, and just trying to figure it out what that looks like. Maybe it's one of those things that not everybody wrestles with.

Sara: Well, that's actually the question I get asked the most about the book from people who’ve read book.

Shelby: Oh, for real?

Sara: That's a question I get asked the most. How do I navigate knowing if God actually wants me to push here or if I'm too step back and submit to the limitations?

I think it actually hits a key pain point, which is the invitation is into the deeper conversation with God. Many of us react to what's available to us and to the dreams we've always had and to the modality we've always had, without actually pausing and going, “What do you have for me in this moment?”

Because sometimes God may say, “I've given you a talent. I want you to invest it. And that investment is going to take a ton of sweat and tears, and go for it.” And sometimes the Lord may be saying, “You've been pushing this thing over and over and over again, and I'm trying to whisper in the background, it's time to let it go.”
Shelby: Yes. Because I can see your story personally, you talked about the infertility and wanting to have kids, seeing your friends with pregnant bellies and over and over and over again it not happening for you all. Then flash forward, I think just ten years maybe some around there and you literally have seven kids.

Sara: I got a whole lot of kids.

Shelby: So first of all, explain how that's physically possible. I know, but yes. Yes, talk about that for a minute.

Sara: It's a laughable story. Well, we adopted, and we had always wanted to adopt.
It wasn't like infertility put us there. We really had, but we thought we would have biological children first. So, we adopted, and we adopted four kids in two years. It very fast grew our family. Then many years later I had four miracle pregnancies, three of which I actually carried to term. And so here I am.

I mean, this is the irony is that I felt incredibly limited at twenty-eight, when all my friends are having kids, and my husband and I are in this empty house by ourselves. I felt incredibly limited at thirty-eight and forty-four with seven kids and going, “How in the world am I going to manage and make it with this many kids?”

Shelby: It's always like, wanting what you don't have. We're single, and we want to be dating someone. Then we're dating, and we want to be married. Then we're married, and we maybe want kids. Then when we have kids, we want to go back to maybe a life where we didn't have kids as much. Or maybe, when you get married, and you feel like, I'm clamoring for the single life that I had before. We always just want something that we don't have.

Sara: That's right.

Shelby: That's why I love how universal this message is. So at one point in the book, you talked about looking at your fence lines with eyes trained to see the beauty of what's inside, not outside. Then you asked yourself, “What if this is freedom?” Can you talk about that for a minute?

Sara: Yes, I think the gift of leaning into the circumstances that God gave me, and I say that because I think we do know that we're made to be overcomers. And I think that combined with sometimes just a fearfulness that we're going to be stuck in our circumstances makes us pretty consistently unsatisfied with our circumstances.

Shelby: Yes.

Sara: As believers in some ways, I think we're oriented towards being dissatisfied with what's right in front of us. Whether we think we need to have some new prayer force to change it, so that it's a big enough faith, or whether we feel like God wants us to overcome what we're walking through. There is something about over time and slowly, I think there's kind of three key factors. One, naming our limitations. Because a lot of us don't actually name them. We just react to them.

Shelby: Yes, that's good.

Sara: So, naming them. The second is grieving those limitations, actually giving ourselves the space to grieve how they've impacted us. A lot of times we feel bad about that. I'm just a kid throwing a tantrum. I need to be grateful.

Well, no, there's a gift that God gave us in grief. We see it in the Psalmist. Psalm 22 is a perfect example. The words that Jesus actually used on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That Psalmist walks through grief. So, the second is actually grieving our limitations.

The third then I think is we name them and we grieve them. The byproduct that happens is we start to actually go, “There is a story that God is working in my life and it's better than the one that I can write and I want to have my eyes open to it.”

There's something that happens in grief. I think it's Jerry Sittser that talks about it in his book, A Grace Disguised, where he talks about grief actually expands our hearts. The microscope gets turned up in grief, because we feel the death and the loss. We start to then pay attention to the smaller things, because the big things feel so hard.

So I start to pay attention to like, ah I love the way the sun hits my deck at four o'clock in the afternoon. I love the sound of Spring. I love it when my windows open and I can hear the birds returning in Spring. I love this song in this afternoon with my windows down, what it makes my heart feel.

I think a byproduct of naming our limitations, of grieving them, is we slowly start to open our eyes to the small ways that God is working in the story we do have, not the story we want, but the story we have in front of us. We begin to receive it and we start to look around and go, there's a lot of good right here.

Shelby: Yes.

Sara: Before my prayer is answered, before this fence line moves, before I overcome, there's actually a lot of good happening right here.

Shelby: I love what you just said. “God will always write a better story than the one I can write for myself.”

Sara: Every time.

Shelby: We don't actually believe that.
Sara: No way.

Shelby: We don't really believe that. We believe that when we're in charge, we're the best person to make the best decisions for our own life, because we know ourselves.
But no, God really knows us to the depths. Tim Keller says that, “He knows you to the depths, yet still loves you to the skies.” So He knows you and all of your bad motivations, horrible thoughts, and words, and even motivations about stuff. But He still loves us and He will always craft a better story than we can for ourselves.

We just need to like actually let that sink from our head into our heart, because I think we could get the theological answers correct.

Sara: Yes, we all would say that, sure. I think it is the circumstances teach us, and that's what I would say is I think these circumstances so many of us resent.

Shelby: Yes.

Sara: The barriers, the boundaries are actually, God has us all on a trajectory where the older we get, if we lean into it, if we're discipled by it, if we're discipled by Him, we slowly begin to really believe your story is best. And that's crazy.

This past spring after I turned in my manuscript, I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease, and I thought, “Oh, the irony here. I've just finished a book on limitations and I was diagnosed with Lyme [Disease].” I was like, “Okay, well now I get to test and see and another level, do I really believe this message?

And I started to just watch the little ways that God was moving in and through my Lyme, and it's not that I'm not praying that God heals me. I absolutely am. But I'm watching and going, “Okay, this is true God, even though this is not. Sickness and disease God can erase in a second. So, I don't think God's sitting and going, “I want to make her sick,” but like God's allowing it.

So, I'm like actually walking out and going, “Your story for me is better than the story I dreamed of.” I did not dream about this for this stage of my life. It's not what I wished for. And yet I'm seeing real time that the story that's unfolding in front of me is better, and I think it's taken me some decades to start to really soak in the reality that His story is so much better than the one we can write.

Shelby: Yes. Because it leads us to Him and He is always better than whatever joyful circumstances we can come up with. He is always better.

Sara: Yes, and that's so much easier said than lived, but when it's lived and you restart to taste that and go, “Oh my gosh, He is really better.”

Shelby: Yes.

Sara: He is really better.
Shelby: Mm hmm.

This leads me to my next question. You talked about at one point, the unclenched fist. So why is the unclenched fist, maybe talk about that for a minute, why is it one of the most complicated parts of our walk with God?

Sara: I think when we are fresh out of the womb. I don't know. I like I watch it with my little kids. My littlest ones still have their minds and eyes set on what they want. I think we sometimes get more sophisticated. So, I’m not throwing tantrums like my four year old. But I still am pretty determined towards what I want.

It has been some serious hardship in my life that has taught me over time, that the more that I can let go of what I want, the more free I am. That is easier said than lived. But once it's lived, I had a moment, this thing that I mentioned earlier that I've been praying for years, and it's a good and right and godly thing. And it just isn't happening.

There was a moment, and I may have written about this in the book, where I just started to go, not only am I going to be okay with this not happening, but it actually feels pretty amazing to be free of the fear of it not happening. Because now I'm walking it out, I'm not just afraid.

Shelby: Yes.

Sara: And it's okay. And more than okay, God is here. It's like when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death and actually see His rod and His staff. comfort you, in some ways it makes you feel invincible. That's what I would say is we in our twenties, right, we feel invincible. Sickness maybe hasn't hit us. We haven't had a whole lot of hardship. A lot of your listeners maybe haven't lost a friend or lost a parent. And so, in some ways I think we feel invincible. Then we've quickly find our natural limits make us - we're not invincible. But could there be a different kind? We crave being invincible.

Is it possible that some of that comes as we walk through some of our hardest circumstances and start to go and God is still real, and I can still find life and I'm still standing and tomorrow has a sunrise. This is freeing.

Shelby: Yes, it really is. It's such a great perspective too, because it points us in the right direction, which actually leads me to my last question, which is how do our limitations point us to Jesus Himself and the beauty of the gospel? Because I thought you did a really great job of fleshing that out.

Sara: Well, it's crazy to think He's the God of the universe and He put Himself in flesh. So, He had to sleep. He had to eat. He burped. He cut his skin. He had acne. I think sometimes we know that practically. I remember reading Max Lucado as an eighteen year old. His books were really profound for me, because of how he depicted the personhood of Jesus. That really struck me. But I think most of the time, unless it's right around Easter, I forget that. But in my own life and I'm seeing my limitations and then I'm going, I have this Great High Priest who had the capability of conquering the entire world. And He died on the cross alone.

Shelby: Yes.

Sara: There is a deep identification there.

When I think of like this God who saved the entire world, and His people betrayed Him. The God who conquered sin, He still wept, and He was tired. And so, it makes me, when I look at my own limitations, I start to go, “Oh, are they also a place of me identifying with God, who's conquering of the whole world also included a death.”

Shelby: Yes, it's beautiful, because it is that upside down principles of the Kingdom that we might be able to theologically unpack, but something that do we actually truly believe that? Because of our limitations, like you talk about in your book, but like I mentioned to you my nerve pain before, my nerve pain has been the single greatest spiritual catalyst in my life.

I love Jesus exponentially more than I used to because of my pain. So, I can hate it and love it at the same time. It's this weird juxtaposition. It's also given me opportunity to speak into suffering in ways that I've not been able to do before. And so, when I do talk about it, people who are suffering are able to come up to me and talk to me and share their stories.

I'm able to relate to them or be more empathetic and listen in ways that they know that I genuinely care and understand suffering. I wouldn't have been able to do that before, if I hadn't have gone through this. I think most importantly it's drawn me to Jesus. I've understood the value of relationship more than the value of a healthy body.

Sara: Whoo.

Shelby: Because for a long time in my pain, I genuinely want to be pain free more than I want to be in a relationship with God. He loved me enough to not give me what I wanted. So, yes. I think almost anybody can look at that and go, “Yes, just think about the person you were dating in high school and wanted to marry.”

Sara: Yes.

Shelby: And you go, “Huh, you dodged that bullet, didn't you? [Laughter] You don't know what you want.” Yes, you don't know what you want. [Laughter]

Sara: That's right.

Shelby: Not everybody. Some people marry their high school sweetheart and it's great.
Sara: But some of you are not so good.

Shelby: Oh, yes. Dear Lord, thank you so much for rescuing me from that mistake.

Well, Sara, is there anything else that maybe we didn't get a chance to talk about that you wanted to mention? Because I want to leave it open for you, if there's something that we didn't cover that you'd really want to leave our listeners with.

Sara: I would just say this one phrase that's kind of stuck in my craw, which is, “I think weak is the new strong.” In a culture that really elevates strong I think we can see that Corinthians reality that, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” That the weaknesses that you are experiencing right now that you probably despise and secretly resent may actually be the piece of the greatest strength in your life. I think weak is the new strong.

Shelby: Weak is the new strong! This might be something that will never be embraced by culture or even the other people around you who are Christians, but I agree with Sara. Shout out to the needy. Shout out to the poor in spirit. Shout out to those who mourn and who are meek. The words of Jesus and the themes of the Bible help us to see the truth that weakness is a good thing in the eyes of God, because He loves showing up when we simply let go and watch Him work.

So thank you to Sara for reminding me of this, and hopefully helping you to see the enormous benefits of God's gracious limitations on your life.

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