Article January 30, 2006 Issue

NO LIMITS/INFINITE POSSIBILITIES

BY ANN STEWART

The sky is not the limit. That's an odd take on an old phrase, but it was the first thing that came to my thought during a midnight phone call from a distraught young friend.

Jenny was calling with an SOS from the US East Coast. She explained that she and her brother were helping their parents with repairs on the family cabin in the Berkshires. They had taken the eaves off the roof that afternoon under sunny skies, but that night the weather had reversed, and a drenching rain was now pouring water between the interior and exterior walls of the cabin. The picture was pretty bleak—the phone connection was getting fuzzy, lights were flickering omniously, and destruction of the drywall and much of the flooring seemed imminent. Jenny said it was a disaster in the making, and at this point tension and discord were reigning within the family as well. I said I would pray right away about the situation.

After we hung up, I returned to my first thought, "The sky is not the limit." I realized that when we say the sky's the limit, we mean the bar is set very high. So the sky may be high, I reasoned, but it's still a limit. A limit on what? On what's possible. I kept praying for the spiritual insights I needed, and I soon remembered the Bible's wonderful promise, "When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him" (Isa. 59:19).