Limitation is possibly the most important characteristic of life. We all want more than life can possibly provide. It is what we do with our limitations that influences how much of reality we embrace. Author Miriam Pollards says, "A limitation is to be burrowed into. The pieces of a broken illusion are to be gathered up and cherished – not put back together like a shattered jar. ...The breaking of a dream is the beginning of a more desirable reality."

Matthew has created our story today of Jesus meeting three limitations. With each temptation, Jesus accepts his limits and throws himself upon a radical trust in God. I want to share three stories of temptation, stories of limitation, that come from Miriam Pollard’s fine little book Acceptance: Passage into Hope. Each is a story of someone awaking to the person they really are.

Billie Lee was the good kid. He always did things right. When he went into the Army, he intended to do his duty well, and return the same good person he was when he went away. But it wasn’t easy. Especially when his duty collided with his sense of morality. There was the day when they rounded up some civilians and accused them of working with the Viet Cong; Billie Lee knew something was going to happen that he didn’t want to be part of. So he asked to be taken off duty. He was relieved, and left. Then someone took the civilians out and killed them all.

Billie kept doing his job, dreaming of home, counting the days until his discharge date in October. Soon he would return to home, to football games, to a world with nobody in it to kill. On his last day of service, he and his buddy were detailed with a group of South Vietnamese to a trouble spot which turned out to be hotter than their officers had foreseen. Heavy sniper fire killed several of the South Vietnamese; they all started to run. His buddy was hit. And Billie started to run. He said, "It’s not easy to admit that you ran away, ...and you left [your buddy] because you were so scared and all you could think about was getting out of there and going home to a football game."

He left Vietnam the next day. He told no one about what happened. Other people were simply things which must not know. He couldn’t love; if they knew, they wouldn’t love him. He couldn’t really give to others they would repudiate the gift. He wasn’t religious, but if there had been a God around, God would have been someone who knew, a confirmation of his own self-condemnation.

Billie plunged into his work, succeeding and rising in responsibility. But the depression was there, and the drinking. His visit to the Vietnam Memorial only intensified his desolation. Finally, he went to one of the Vet Centers for their rap sessions with fellow survivors. There he could face the reality that the person Billie wanted to be; the person he believed he had to be, was destroyed by Vietnam. It was the only kind of self he knew anything about – being the good man. He tried to put it back together. But the broken pieces tore at his inner self.

There is something better than manufacturing the kind of self we feel we have to be; and that is to begin, little by little, to find and become what we really are. At that Vet Center Billie was able to come home to his own heart, and the very shame that had been secretly poisoning him became the bond that draws him close to his weak and humiliated fellows. Instead of being a flawless projection deserving of love, he is a real person who can be loved whether or not he deserves it. Forgiveness means being given back yourself with your wounds turned into sources of compassion and humble joy. They may never be healed but they become creative rather than destructive.

Walter Ciszek’s book about his life begins, "I think you have to know I was born stubborn. I was also tough." He joined the Jesuits, the Catholic order famed for its rigor. And his thesis was titled "On the Training of the Will." When he was arrested and sent to Moscow’s Lubianka Prison, he went with absolute confidence that he could hold his own against any interrogator.

In the 12^th month of interrogations, he gave up. What does it matter? "What difference can it possibly make to anyone except me," he thought, "and I simply wanted out." He signed whatever they put in front of him.

Walter returned to his cell in shame. First because his will had failed. Then, because he knew he had really believed in his own ability instead of trusting God. He came to a place where he abandoned his dependence upon himself to trust only God. But four more years of interrogation brought him to a new, more desperate place. He knew he had failed before, but then he came to a despair where he had lost the last shred of his hope and his faith in God as well. He was alone, broken in the void.

The refreshing thing about Walter Ciszek is that he was never too annihilated to pray. He sought the God he had forgotten. And the answer to his prayer was a very ordinary thought. It was nothing new or original. It was simply that he was consoled by the thought of Jesus and his agony in the Garden, when Jesus felt his own weakness and asked to have the cup of his ordeal removed. An ordinary light began to burn in Ciszek. Commonplace, unmystical, unromantic. He knew the inside of Jesus’ relationship with God. It was that "Whenever Jesus begged to be let off, he concluded with an act of total abandonment and submission to the Father’s will." Ciszek’s life was changed from that moment on. The future, hidden as it was, was hidden in God’s will, and therefore acceptable no matter what it might bring.

It wasn’t like that for Betty. Nothing so instantaneous or shattering. She was nice and attractive. She raised a large family with good-humored grit, often so house-bound she was "glad to dump the garbage, just to get out a few minutes." But this increasing buzz of a discomfort wouldn’t go away. An uneasiness, a sense of inevitable failure before one’s hand is set to the task. The kids are grown. She’s only slightly less busy than before, but she’s faithful to her daily half hour of prayer, and her whole being has been open for years to the common and extraordinary surrenders of friendship, marriage, work and motherhood.

She feels that other people have it all together. She wants to find that book that explains it all; precise directions about how to do life well. She would like to think beautiful thoughts about the Bible. What is surrender to God, she wants to know, and how do you do it? She’s thought about God as though God were out there looking at us, like the audience for our performance – judging, applauding, sometimes booing.

But then Betty says, she just grew. Something slowly emerged. She stopped thinking of God as the choreographer out in the fifth row assessing your performance. God is your partner and every other dancer as well. God is the choreography and the energy that gives the muscles their ability to respond. And it’s not a performance at all but a dance for its own sake, an adventure, a discovery, a celebration of grace. You don’t want to quit because the dance is what you are and the object of your search.

Limitations are invitations to know God. When we are weak and famished. When we think we can handle it; we think we can fly. When we’re settling for less than full reality. We face our selves – our ugly truths, our self-centered facade, that buzzing discomfort. A limitation is to be burrowed into. The breaking of a dream is the beginning of a more desirable reality. Like being known. Like abandoning to God’s will. Like dancing with God.