It will likely be of little surprise to you that in the week after my shoulder surgery, I have been thinking a lot about limits.
There are many things right now that I simply cannot do. I knew this would be the case, of course. And in many ways, I may have been better prepared than many. After all, I have walked alongside a good number of other people who have had surgeries both like and unlike mine, and who have for other reasons come upon sudden limitations with their bodies.
I knew I would not be able to drive. I knew I would require help getting a shirt on and off. I knew I would need help washing my hand. I knew I would not be able to play guitar. I knew I would not be able to write, as I am right-handed. I knew typing would be a challenge. And I was right about all of these things. I knew about them in fact, but I did not comprehend them all in effect.
It did not occur to me how often I wished to reach for my guitar. It did not occur to me how deeply the physical act of writing and journaling had become a part of my emotional and spiritual processing. It did not occur to me how essentially “independent” and “self-reliant” much of my life actually was.
And so this rapid swing from relative independence to complete dependence — coupled with a loss of processing tools — has been challenging in ways I never expected. I was prepared for extreme pain that never materialized (I am grateful for that!) but I was not prepared for losing some of the tools for managing life’s disruptions like this one.
That’s me. And maybe I’m overstating or overthinking things right now. But limits are limits. And we run up against them as individuals and as institutions.
It may not be as sudden, but as an institution, a day came when we realized we didn’t have the people for that program we used to do… money for that mission we used to support… resources for that partnership that had been so fruitful. Suddenly we noticed it became harder to find officers & volunteers. Suddenly it became clear that reconciling the budget was less a matter of frugality and more one of systemic change.
Something had changed — possibly felt broken — and maybe we could see and understand what that was and maybe we could not. Maybe we had seen what was coming. Maybe we had known something of the trends. But knowing limits in fact and living among their effects are not the same.
The limitations I face because of my surgery are, I expect, temporary, and are accompanied by a kind of hope. After all, the point of surgery is to do the difficult work of setting right something within a body that cannot heal on its own. Barring some terrible mistake on my part or some unforeseen and unavoidable accident, my body should eventually be stronger because of the surgery — when all is said and done, and once the changes the surgery brought about have been able to be fully healed and integrated into my body’s structure.
Sometimes institutional change can be that way too. It can feel like a kind of surgery that handicaps us, and even (in the short term) takes away some of our ability to do things that matter to us quite a bit. Fiddling with structures and systems can be a bit like doing so with bones and tendons and muscles. But sometimes surgery is the only way to accomplish healing. Sometimes we have to make these choices to undo ourselves in order to be stronger in the future.
But also like surgery on a body, this kind of institutional surgery requires a diagnosis or it brings harm rather than healing. We need to be able to understand what isn’t working. We need to envision what we want to be able to do. If we don’t know what it is we hope to be and do, then we won’t know how this Body needs strengthened for the task. There are diagnostics to be run. Discoveries to be made. Decisions to be wrestled with. And ultimately, we will have a path to chart and follow (that brings its own set of anticipated and unanticipated consequences) as we navigate toward a tomorrow we will never feel prepared for — yet we will certainly face with competence and purpose so long as we do it together and with the God who is our center.
Remember, we’re all in this together.
Pastor Michael