Is there anything too hard for God?

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So allow me to illustrate a concept for you.

You start playing ping pong. At first you’re not very good, but after a few years you’re starting to get your confidence. Couple years later and you’re beating most everyone in your peer group. Soon you start going to local community events.

When you’re playing with your nephews, you don’t play the same way you do at the community center. Their skills just aren’t there yet.

Since you can’t play the ordinary way, you go looking for ways to keep it interesting for you. You’re no longer playing to win. When I get the chance to play a lot of ping pong with someone I’m outclassing, I go for style points. I still win, of course, but I do it with wild and crazy shots that I miss half as many times as I hit. In so doing I’m able to win, give the other person a decent practice partner, have an epic amount of fun, and most importantly, still be operating at the edge of my abilities.

That last one is why it’s still interesting. It’s not that much fun if you’re not working on your skills somehow. And it doesn’t matter who I’m playing with, if I load constraints onto myself I can still work on my own abilities.

Where you see the limits of my abilities is, well, everywhere. Each individual shot plays at the intersection of how well I can pay attention and execute. It’s just that only so much of it is focused on the specific goal of putting the ball somewhere you can’t hit it back from. I could do that easily much of the time.

But a lot of times the person I’m playing with has enough difficulty just hitting easy shots back to me. So instead what I’ll do is use all my skills to hit the ball back to the exact same place no matter where the return comes. Doesn’t matter how hard they hit it, how much spin they put on it, they’ll get an easy lob back to the center of the table to try it again.

I’ll be huffing and puffing all over the table to get these shots!

This is how God finds His limits. Not in the macro, but rather in the micro. There’s no one thing God can’t do. But if you spread God thin enough, and make Him look for enough opportunities for style, and to work extra hard to make it look easy for everyone else, eventually you’ll find stuff that even God can’t do.

A bit blasphemous to challenge omnipotence in this way, but it’s been borne through with my experience. There are dimensions you can enter into where every little mistake is magnified continuously. The more magnified, the harder it is to ensure an acceptable outcome. Eventually the rubber comes totally off the tire and God lets the car crash happen.