Delightful Limitations?

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence…  Discontent is always greatly concerned with boundaries.  In many cases, our boundary lines are not literal – but they are just as real as a picket fence dividing two back yards!

Consider the young man who is discontented with his height.  He wishes that the boundary line of his “tallness” was further from the floor.  Or the couple who wishes they had more in their retirement accounts.  They wish that the boundaries of their IRA’s encompassed more money.  The young woman with a dreadful diagnosis – she wishes the boundary lines of her life included more years.  Boundary lines set a limit to what is ours.  My field of vision has boundary lines.  So does my family, my library, and my schedule…  Your life can be described according to such lines as well.

In and of themselves, those lines might not be so pleasant.  If my field of vision were to be considered as a brute fact, those boundary lines are not pleasant.   I am down to about six degrees of vision!  I am sure that you have some far less than ideal limits in your own life that you  find difficult to appreciate.  So did David the Psalmist – even when he wrote these words:

“The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.”  Psalm 16:6

Psalm 16 begins with a request to be kept safe.  This psalm fits the context of its neighbors in the psalter.  David is under great stress and pressure in the face of King Saul’s continual attempts to find him and harm him.  David has less than ideal boundary lines for his number and influence of friends, for his broken relationship with King Saul, and for his sojourns in both Moab and Philistia among those who “run after other gods.”  Yet because David sees his relationship with God as being the one thing that both matters and gives meaning and worth to all other things, he is able to rejoice in the limits God has imposed upon his existence.  He sings, “LORD, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure.” (Psalm 16:5).

Where has God given us boundary lines?  Which of our boundaries is least delightful when considered from a worldly perspective?  Over which fences does the grass appear to be greener?  Can we view the limiting boundaries in our lives as having some beautiful and glorious purpose simply because we know that we have received all such inheritances from the LORD?

Let us pray for one another that we, like David at the end of this Psalm, might also have glad hearts and bodies that rest secure – because God, the Great Assigner of All, has assured us that apart from him, we have no good thing (verse 1).  And, as Ephesians 1:3 has taught us, “God has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.”

Your Pastor,

Bob Bjerkaas

N.B.  The image is a public domain copy of Vincent van Gogh’s Wheatfields after the Rain, 1890.  I like how he used different shades of greens and yellows for each of the fields.