Learning from Friends and Kate Bowler About Being Human Because of Our Limitations: Acceptance
Today, a friend and I were talking about our limitations. During the conversation, I said, so righteously, that I tried not to let my limitations define me. Shortly afterward, I read Kate Bowler’s weekly writing: “Are there forms of truth-telling that can ONLY come from our limitations, our faults, our quirks, our suffering, our humanity? What would that be like, if you trusted yourself to be a person who can face the future not in spite of your limitations but because of them? Without our limitations, suffering, quirks, humanity, how can we possibly say that we have discovered what it means to be human?”1
Bowler went on to ask us to write about times when our suffering made us more human rather than less so, changed our minds, made us apologize, made us laugh at ourselves, or enabled us to sit with someone else’s sadness rather than try to solve it.
First of all, what serendipity that our conversation and Kate’s writing came so close together. That always makes me pause and realize there is truth in this connection.
I have witnessed in my own life affirmations of all her writing prompts. I have learned to apologize more freely for not accepting the actions of people who became that way because of their suffering, and to see their goodness rather than seeing them as all bad. I have come to laugh at myself when I start doing the same things my parents did, things I knew I would never do. Each day, I know more and more about how to listen, listen, and listen to people in pain instead of being there to fix them. More and more, I see God using me, defects and all, especially teaching me to accept others because of the suffering and mistakes in my own life.
The paradox: A mistake is not a mistake unless we don’t learn from it.
But not every mistake is a learning lab.
1 Kate Bowler, “You are not a Robot. Yet, on Authenticity, Abraham Lincoln, and Why Your Limitations are the Whole Point, ” Kate Bowler from Everything Happens, August 19. 2026
Joanna joannaseibert.com