A person's days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed. – Job 14:5

Today's Scripture Reading (July 12, 2021): Job 14

American writer and Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner said we should "Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." The only real competition of which any of us should strain to win is that battle that we might be a better person today than the one we were yesterday.

Job looks at God and sees someone who is trying to restrict him. He argues that God has decreed what his limits should be and that he can't exceed them. And he is not wrong. We are limited; it is part of what is meant by being mortal and part of God's creation. Isaiah would phrase it this way.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways,"
 declares the Lord.
"As the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9)

But Job is also wrong. Job argues that he had suffered under the hubris of believing that he could achieve something in this life, and, like the hero of Greek mythology, Icarus, he had flown too close to the sun, and God had brought him back to earth. But the truth is that while God has placed limits on his creation, and we cannot comprehend the thoughts of God, we rarely reach the potential that God has placed inside of us. God may have set limits on Job, but Job had never reached the upper end of those limits, even on his best days.

And neither have we. We may not accomplish everything, but we are not even close to reaching the limits that God has placed on us. We can be better tomorrow than we were today. And with God on our side, we can stretch for the limits that God has placed on us. We might not possess unlimited potential, but the fence that God has placed around us is still a long way off, and there is so much more that we can achieve, actions that God has placed in the hearts of all of us who belong to this race we call human than we will ever be able to accomplish.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Job 15