Unlimited Capacity

I've been in prayer meetings where people have prayed to be the hands and feet of Jesus. I too have prayed a similar prayer and still do. I have prayed for God to give me eyes to see the world as he sees it. To weep for the things he weeps for and for my heart to break for what breaks his. Have you prayed this prayer? Are you praying this payer? Know this, that in love, God answers our prayers and the Spirit makes us more like him- like his Son. But know this as well, our conforming to the image of Jesus has its costs.

It is an amazing and overwhelming experience when the Spirit allows you to actually be the hands and the feet. I am carrying bags of food deep into the recesses of the slums. The bags are heavy, the pathways trash laden and uneven. It is hot, dusty and smelly. I enter a shack and am greeted by a woman dying of AIDS caring for who knows how many kids. The Nairobi church team members offer her the food. I pray for her and her family. She smiles once. We hug them and thank them for allowing us to come and minister to them.

We visit a few more homes delivering food and praying for HIV/AIDS affected households. I duck as I enter into the next tragedy, and then the next. I have had the privilege of these home visits several times before in Mathare, Kayole, and Kibera. I have trudged through the slums of Nairobi with our church partners for 4 or 6 hours at a time, going to home after home. To be quite honest it is physically and spiritually overwhelming.

Being the hands and feet can sometimes be a difficult task. I think of what limited capacity I have to actually be the hands and feet of Jesus, caring for the sick, assisting the poor, feeding the hungry: for two hours.

The Gospels tell us that 'they brought their sick to Jesus and he spent whole days healing and praying for the people'. He spent entire days. What a man this Jesus was and is. What capacity for compassion. What strength and what power. As I am confronted with just how limited I am, how even my best efforts to love my neighbor fall so very short. I think of the Christ and am in awe at what a savior he is. He has no limitations. He has unending capacity. The capacity to free the captive, to feed the hungry, to make the lame walk, and the blind see while he was on earth, a capacity so great that he healed the spiritual state of God's people by appeasing the Fathers wrath once and for all.

Being faced with your own physical and spiritual limitations is not easy. It is the continual process of excising the pride and residue of sin that resides in all of God’s people (Jesus come quickly!). Facing these limitations increases my knowledge of the limitlessness of God- how great his capacity is to care, to love, and to heal. The mental, spiritual, and physical anguish experienced is worth the cost of God's deeper revelation of himself.