How many biographies have you read or seen about the driven individual who has achieved personal triumph? And how many biographies have you read or seen about the relational person embedded within community?
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Kelly Kapic’s You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (Brazos). This book aims to lift from our shoulders the sense that we carry the weight of the world. I appreciate how Kapic situates theological truth in contrast with cultural expectations. You can see the goodness of God’s creation and the gospel of Jesus Christ when you consider the alternate message we hear from the world. For example, he writes:
What an irony that our modern age, on the one hand, exhausts us by its calls for complete self-expression and, on the other hand, suffocates us by its pressures to conform. We must constantly adopt ever-changing fashions, humor, and music, and yet keep up the appearance that we are independently minded.
But Kapic doesn’t just find problems with the world’s perspective. He also asks hard questions of the church, such as, “Why do we pit compassion against success, grace against growth, and tenderness against effort?” It’s a problem in the church when contentedness looks like complacency.
Kapic joined me on Gospelbound to discuss the good news of limits, living in the moment, the fear of the Lord, and our identity in Christ.