Deep Limitations Teach Deep Trust

Personal moment that frames the piece

Michele Morin begins with a concrete scene: a watch alarm reminding her to take medication for Parkinson's disease and the nausea that has come with that drug. Those small, daily realities prompt grief for the "prescription-free" energy of earlier days. Instead of resisting that grief, she treats the limits of aging and illness as God's assignment to learn patience and trust.

Morin's central claim is straightforward: God designed human limits so we learn to worship him. When our resources run out, we cry for rescue. Letting go of trying to accomplish what only God can do displaces trust in our own strategies and places it in God's limitless nature. Acknowledging our creaturely limits opens the way to freedom.

The essay lists everyday ways people try to usurp God's unique attributes:

• Unchangeableness: We shrug off responsibility by claiming "that's just the way I am," a move that reaches for what belongs to God alone.
• Omnipotence: When circumstances feel uncontrollable, we manipulate or nag to gain control we were not designed to hold.
• Omnipresence: Technology and parenting styles can create a counterfeit omnipresence—phones at the table, helicopter parenting, or constant intrusion into adult children's lives—denying necessary space for failure and growth.

Morin labels these efforts "vanity and a striving after wind" by pointing to Scripture that reserves God's incommunicable attributes for God alone.

Morin draws on Isaiah 55:8–9 and Psalm 103:11 to illustrate the vast difference between God's ways and ours: as high as the heavens are above the earth. That cosmic idiom helps communicate the infinitude of God's love and thought compared with human finitude. The theological point is practical: God's otherness includes attributes we need but cannot possess.

Why God's difference matters for everyday life

Morin concludes with the claim that God's otherness did not leave him distant. In Jesus Christ God clothed himself in humanity and submitted to death on a cross. That act is presented as the ultimate expression of God drawing near, providing a decisive reason to trust the God who remains infinitely different yet intimately present.