On the same day about a month ago the final Shuttle Mission was launched and the Debt Ceiling was reached. Simultaneously we were reminded of our seemingly limitless reach and our occasional refusal to put it to use. In many ways, this is the paradox of modern life, a simultaneous state of awe over our realized potential and our continued failures. We can reach the moon and the sun but we can’t seem to learn how to live together with people who are different. Why is it that for every moment of reaching space we seem to have one hundred moments of stubborn refusal to use our talents for creative purposes?
There are many reasons we don’t realize our potential, and most of them boil down to one of three things, underestimating our potential, overestimating our potential, or being indifferent to our potential. Taking them in reverse order, indifference is a great threat in a society which believes it has it made and things don’t need to get much better, as long as they don’t get worse. We have shelter, food, clothing and safety, plus the opportunity to gain more of all the above, why would we care too much about our potential.
For people who know they are talented overestimating our potential is a very real danger. When I played basketball as a child my dad was the coach. He would always brag that at the end of games he could pull me aside and tell me that he needed me to turn it on and I would. I had learned that I didn’t need my best all the time, I was good enough without it for most sitations and I could trust it to be there when I needed it. There is not much in life that requires fully realizing our potential, though, and it never gets used even though we know it is there.
While both of these can be dangerous they do not close off potential, just lower the odds that it will be realized. Underestimating potential, on the other hand, eliminates it altogether. When we understimate potential we say it can’t be done and we limit what we are capable of. The Good News isn’t just a story from two thousand years ago, it is that we are created with the potential to transcend all limits, even death. The Good News is that the stories of a world redeemed which seem impossible are possible, that God’s creation is crackling with that potential. The Good News opens up the possibilities before us, and reminds us that when we set ourselves to do something, even the impossible, we have the potential to reach the limitless heavens.
