Many of us live with the feeling of perpetual overload. There may be extraordinary situations when we must carry an unusually heavy weight for a season—raising young children, the first couple of years of a church start-up, needing to juggle a few different jobs just to make ends meet. Yet when our lives feel perpetually pressed down by the weight of too many demands, it is often the result of having overly porous boundaries.

We can find greater freedom when we realize that we’re not called to meet every single need.

Discern Our Limits

Parker Palmer, a wise Quaker elder, describes how he came to this realization. In his beautiful book Let Your Life Speak, he writes, “If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship—and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular ‘good.’”[i]

Palmer gives a personal example:

Over the years, I have met people who have made a very human claim on me by making known their need to be loved. For a long time, my response was instant and reflexive, born of the “oughts” I had absorbed: “Of course you need to be loved. Everyone does. And I love you.”

It took me a long time to understand that although everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the source of that gift to everyone who asks me for it. There are some relations in which I am capable of love and others in which I am not. To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes I am unable to honor, is to damage my own integrity and that of the person in need—all in the name of love.[ii]

Realizing that we do not have to say “yes” to every noble or good opportunity can feel as if a heavy load has been lifted from our back. By discerning our limits, we can care for ourselves—and then we can offer the gift of ourselves to others.

I know this dynamic personally. By nature, I feel compelled to try to accomplish as much as possible, not necessarily out of an altruistic desire to contribute, but largely to please and impress others, shore up my self-esteem, and validate my existence.

Part of my restless over-functioning, along with the accompanying shame from the niggling feeling that I haven’t done enough, stems from not having discerned God’s will and not recognizing that God is giving me freedom to say “no.” I find myself praying with the monk Thomas Merton, “Free me from laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me . . . Give me humility in which alone is rest.” Increasingly, I long to eschew the vain glory and futility of trying to impress others and live more consciously before the eyes of God.

If we live more consciously before the loving gaze of God, we will receive insight into God’s providential limits for our lives. When we accept these limits as a gift from God, we can live with less shame and false guilt—feelings that stem from a sense that we haven’t done quite enough—and discover more joyful contentment.

Discover Our Limitations

When I made the transition from the corporate world to vocational Christian ministry, I enrolled in the Arrow Leadership Program, a ministry that helps develop young, emerging Christian leaders. During our graduation ceremony, Leighton Ford, the founder of this ministry, prayed a public blessing over each of the graduates. Though that was more than twenty-five years ago now, I still vividly remember him praying that I would be given a ministry in Canada and Japan.

At the time Leighton prayed this blessing over me, I was studying at a theological seminary in the Boston area and would soon head west to help start a new church in southern California. But a couple of years later, God called me to Canada—where I have now served for more than two decades—and unexpectedly opened an opportunity for me to minister in Japan. Given the religious demographics of Vancouver and Japan and my own gift limitations, I realize that I will not be leading huge ministries. There is a limit to my call, and I accept this limit—and in this limitation, I find freedom.

Sometimes we discover our limitations as someone prays prophetically over us or as we follow the unfolding of God’s providential plan. Other times, we may discover our limitations through some feedback or observation we make about ourselves. I’ve long known that I won’t make any contributions to the world through music or singing. This has been confirmed when, occasionally, during worship at church, someone beside me has asked, “Are you trying to sing harmony?” (meaning instead of the melody), when I was simply singing off tune!

Our life stage also can represent a season of limitation. If you’re a mother or father of young children, caring for aging parents, experiencing the loss of an important relationship, starting a new line of ministry with a steep learning curve, facing a health challenge or financial setback, or needing to work two or three jobs just to pay the rent, you will experience significant limitations.

We can also discover our limits by discerning whether an activity feels life-giving or draining. Parker Palmer writes,

One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess—the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.[iii]

Trying to give what we do not have is surely a road to burnout. However, attempting to do too much of something we enjoy can also feel burdensome.

When I was a new pastor, I often felt a sense of delight if I looked at my calendar and saw that I would be meeting multiple people over the course of the day. But I discovered that if I had seven or more pastoral care meetings in a single day, I would end up feeling exhausted.

We may love preaching, but we may find preaching more than two or three times on any given Sunday is exhausting. Or we observe that if we preach more than a certain number of times a year, we are scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel and reading the Bible, not to encounter God for ourselves and others, but to crank out a message.

‘Less Is More’

Even if we find inherent joy in something, as the trope goes, “too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.” We need limits, even with the “good things” in our life. As my preaching professor Haddon Robinson used to say about sermons, “less is more,” so in our lives less, in the economy of God, may be more. Our limits may lead us not only to a greater sense of relaxed contentment, but also to a more fruitful life.

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Ken’s new book Now I Become Myself: How Deep Grace Heals Our Shame and Restores Our True Self.

[i] Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 47.

[ii] Ibid., 47.

[iii] Ibid., 49.

Ken Shigematsu is pastor of Tenth Church in Vancouver, BC and the author of the award-winning, bestseller God in My Everything