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What if you haven't lived up to your potential?
In this reflection on Psalm 8, John Ortberg explores one of the great wonders of God's creation: human potential.
You can count the seeds in an apple.
But you cannot count the apples in a seed.
Human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to grow, create, love, serve and become. Psalm 8 looks at the vastness of the heavens and then marvels that God is mindful of us.
But there's another side to potential.
It can become a burden.
I should be further along.
I should have accomplished more.
I should have made better decisions.
I should be more successful, disciplined, attractive, productive or fulfilled.
What happens when the possibility of what we could become turns into disappointment over what we haven't become?
John offers two truths to carry with us:
“I am but dust and ashes.”
And:
“The whole world was created on my account.”
One reminds us that we are limited creatures.
The other reminds us that we are deeply loved.
And if you're worried that too much of your life has already passed or that you've wasted your potential, remember:
God never gets trapped in the past.
Today is still here.
And who knows what God may yet have in store?
In this episode:
Psalm 8 and human potential
Recovering awe and wonder
Why we become blasé about extraordinary things
Abraham Joshua Heschel on human possibility
What it means to participate in the divine nature
How potential becomes a burden
The pressure to constantly optimize our lives
“I am but dust and ashes”
“The whole world was created on my account”
What to do when you feel insignificant
What to do when you feel too important
Letting go of regret about wasted potential
Why God isn't trapped in your past
Scriptures: Psalm 8 • 2 Peter 1:4 • Genesis 18:27 • Luke 23:39–43
00:00 The Burden of Potential 00:11 You Can't Count the Apples in a Seed 00:34 Psalm 8 & Human Potential 00:55 Have You Considered the Heavens Lately? 01:15 How We Lose Our Sense of Wonder 01:33 What Is Mankind That You Are Mindful of Us? 02:05 The Potential of the Human Soul 02:22 What Could This Child Become? 02:54 Apples in a Seed 03:05 Made to Participate With God 03:22 Participate in the Divine Nature 04:19 Do You Remember What It Was Like With God? 05:31 The Legend of the Child and the Torah 06:44 E. E. Cummings & the Wonder of Creation 07:12 When Potential Becomes a Burden 07:32 What Am I Going to Do With All This Potential? 08:00 The Pressure to Optimize Your Life 08:59 Two Truths You Need to Carry 09:27 I Am But Dust and Ashes 09:33 The Whole World Was Created on My Account 09:45 When You Feel Too Important 10:04 When You Feel Insignificant 10:25 What If You've Wasted Your Potential? 10:47 The Thief on the Cross 11:08 God Isn't Trapped in Your Past 11:18 You Still Can't Count the Apples in a Seed
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At Become New, get 10 minutes of spiritual formation every weekday with John Orberg.
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Of all of God's creations, I think one of the greatest is his creation of potential. In Genesis, when he makes the world, uh, it is filled with living things that have the potential to bring forth even more and greater living things. I love this. I don't know who first said it. Um, you can count the seeds in an apple, you cannot count the number of apples in a seed. There is a wonder when we look at what creation might yet be, and that is supremely true when it comes to people. We're looking at the Psalms, and today we're going to look at Psalm 8. I want to give some observations from this little book, Duets on the Psalm. Uh, in verse 3 in Psalm 8, it says, When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have set in place. Pause there for a second. Have you considered the heavens lately? One of our great problems is a loss of awe and wonder at what it is that God has made. Uh Rabbi Kushner noted that the first time that human beings went up to the moon, one small step from man, one giant leap for mankind, the whole world held its breath. Everybody on the planet was watching. Second time people caught it on the evening news. The third time they can only get people to pay attention by literally putting a golf ball on the moon. We just get blasé about stuff. So today, consider the heavens, the moon and the stars that God has sent into place. But then here's the focus of this meditation. What is mankind that you are mindful of them? Human beings that you care for them. This is Rabbi Abraham Heschel. One thing that sets man apart from animals is a boundless, unpredictable capacity for the development of an inner universe. Now, this remarkable potential, as we will see, can become kind of a burden. Part of what I want to look at today is uh what makes it burdensome and how to let go of that burden, and what are the two thoughts you and I need to carry with us through this day that can release us from that burden and help us to live in the midst of this wonder and in the midst of our little creaturely neediness. There is more potentiality in the human soul than any other being known to us. Look at the infant and try to imagine the multitude of events it is going to engender. One child named Johann Sebastian Bach was charged with power enough to hold generations of men in his spell. The enigma of human being is not in what he is, but in what he is capable to be. I can count the number of seeds in an apple. No idea how many apples were in that seed. Um The psalmist goes on. Uh you have made human beings rulers over the works of your hand. You have put everything under their feet, flocks and herds, the animals in the wild, the birds in the skies, the fish in the sea. The potential of human beings to work for good in the image of God with partnership with God. That's what lies before us today. Now, if you're wondering, what do I have to do today? It'd be a good thing to do. I'll give you one. This is from 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 4. Peter says about God, God has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you might participate in the divine nature. So, there's a little pastime today. How would you like to participate in the divine nature? Now, something's nature is just the expression of its essential being of what it is. The divine nature, of course, that's God's character, that's his love and the generosity of his spirit and his kindness and his goodness. He's openned this to, and now you're invited to participate in the divine nature as God is at work through Jesus Christ in me and in you. Uh, one of the rabbis quotes this story. Might have heard it before. He said that he heard it from uh Bernard Precker, who owns an art gallery in Brookline, Massachusetts. The customer had told him something strange happened in our house. I don't begin to understand it. A few days ago, I my wife and I brought a newborn baby home from the hospital. First thing we did was just show it to our older child, about four and a half years old, put the baby in her crib, closed the door. The older child said, Do me a favor, would you let me be alone with the baby for just a minute? First the parents were a little hesitant. They thought about sibling rivalry. Don't know. We had stories about that. But they decided they would let him have a few minutes alone with the baby. After all, they had a video and audio monitor set up in the baby's room. Now you can have a little AI monitor for your own baby. And thought it'd be safe to let the child have his wish. They hid behind the door so they could eavesdrop. As they spied, they saw their four-year-old child bend down and stroke the head of his baby sister, and then heard this child whisper something to the baby. Do you still remember what it was like when you lived with God? Then he said, The reason I am asking you is because I am beginning to forget. And then the rabbi writes, Isn't that an amazing story? This four-year-old child asked his newborn baby sister whether she still remembered. What's it like to be with uh before she was born? Because he was starting to forget. You may dismiss this story if you wish. I'm not sure that I believe it myself. I think versions of it have been around a long time, personally. But when I heard it, I was reminded of an old Jewish legend that you might remember too. An old Jewish legend says, during the nine months that a child is inside its mother's womb, an angel lives there with the child, and during these nine months, this angel teaches the child the whole Torah. But when the baby is born, the angel hits the child on the upper lip, and the child forgets all the Torah they have learned. And that, at least according to the legend, is why the child cries when they are born, and that is why every bo child is born with a cleft on their upper lip. The idea that a newborn child is not a tabula rosa, a blank slate, but comes into this world bearing memories of having once been surrounded by holiness is a concept that is found in Psalm 8, and that bobs up in some very unexpected places in modern poetry, like E. E. Cummings writes, I thank you, God, for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and a blue true dream of sky, for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is you. Now, God places us with this enormous burden just a little lower than the heavenly beings, uh, amazing capacity to be able to work for good, and yet and yet and yet and yet and yet, for many, many, many people, and I know this experience myself, often that word potential becomes quite a negative word, quite a burdensome word, quite a weighty word, because I feel like I have not lived up to it. And and like I have been a disappointment. You ever feel that way? Uh, this was a Substack letter that I read quite recently by a young woman headed, Now, what am I gonna do with all this potential? There is, she writes, a special kind of hell that exists in being an ambitious, heavy quotes, 28-year-old who is gorged with potential. I am constantly being told how I can better capitalize on this letter. Will I ever write full time? How my book proposal is coming, how can I strategize to get to the next step in my career that I should say yes to another date with guys I don't actually like, plan more trips, save more money, make the most out of the critical minutes that fill my day, journal more, look prettier, appear smarter, dress sexier, and just be so much better. Just this pressure to optimize potential. And then one more quote. I know that my potential is not finite. Isn't it? It has no expiration date. Doesn't it? That I am a person of exceptional tenacity to make life exactly how they want. However, I would be lying if I said I didn't cry from time to time and think about when it will all eventually leave me, and if I will still be thinking about my potential and all the missteps I took along the way. I suppose I will never figure it out. So, uh, here are the two thoughts that you need to carry with you through the day. This is from Rabbi Bunam, who is a Polish rabbi several hundred years ago, and he says, every person needs to uh carry a card with them with two statements, one ri written on each side of the card. The first one that come from God's conversation with Abraham is I am but dust and ashes. And the second one is the whole world was created on my account. God created the world out of love for you, and the idea is we carry these two statements around, and when I'm starting to feel too powerful, too puffed up, too grandiose, I'm just a little lower than the heavenly beings. Yeah. Truth about me is I'm a little dust bunny. I am but dust and ashes. I am ordinary, I am fallen, I can do nothing on my own. This is the truth about me. But then, but then when I start to feel insignificant or in despair, then the world was created on my account. God loved you so much that creation is his gift to you. And of course, not just you, to me and to all of his creatures. God so loved the world, God so loved the world that he filled it with potential. And you have potential. And if you're worrying, man, it feels like a lot of life has gone by and uh I've messed up. Remember, today is the day of salvation. God never gets trapped in the past. God is never haunted by what went before. When the thief who was on the cross, the repentant at the very end, and he got up to heaven, they didn't say, Hey, what are you doing here? You didn't fulfill your potential. Yeah, the man on the middle cross said I could come. Man on the middle cross says today, this is your day, this is the day of salvation. Who knows what God has in store for you and me? Letting go of what is past, I turn forward towards what is the future. I live in awe and wonder at the heavens that God created and that I'm part of that creation. And I don't know what today could hold. Because I can count the number of seeds in an apple.
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Between those two statements, I am but dust and ashes, or the whole world was created on my account. What do you most need to lean into today, to be reminded of, to hear? In fact, if you want to drop it in the chat wherever you're watching or listening, it'd be fun to just see where everybody's at today. Become New is a global community with people tuning in all over the world who've put Jesus in charge of their spiritual formation. And we distribute these teachings every weekday to help you grow in Christ. One of the things that we do every weekday is we meet to pray. So wherever you're at between those two statements, you could let us know. We would love to pray for you. Every weekday we meet as a team to pray out loud for our community, for people we see chiming in on YouTube, or people that text us or email us their prayer requests. You can text us your prayer request at our cell number, 51504. Or if you're a part of that international community, you can email it to us at connect at become new.com. But where are you at today? What do you need to be reminded of? That you are but dust and ashes, or that the whole world was created on your account. If you want to find out more from Become New, head over to become new.com. Everything's for free, just for you, because we're a nonprofit, and uh we're glad to be here with you. So for now, I'm signing off until next time. Which is tomorrow, by the way.
