Last week as I was driving home from church the cooking show Milk Street Radio was playing on my local NPR station. A caller asked about a French bread he liked to bake and how to make it last longer since it would quickly grow stale. The caller said, “The pain de mie I make has a very low shelf life. What am I doing wrong?” The host Christopher Kimball’s answer struck me and I’m writing it down here not to forget it. He essentially said the caller wasn’t doing anything wrong, but was expecting this French bread to do something it was not designed to do. He was baking pain de mie the right way, but apparently if you’re baking pain de mie the right way you can’t expect it to last long. If what the man wanted was to bake a loaf of white bread with a higher shelf life, the solution wouldn’t be to adjust the recipe or his technique but to pick a different kind of white bread, one actually suited to that objective. (If you were wondering, the host recommended a Japanese milk bread.)

I’m not a baker or even much of a cook, but this answer struck me because it suggested a broad principle that would be true in many other areas of life. Sometimes the thing we are doing isn’t achieving the desired effect not because we are doing that thing wrong, or because there is anything wrong with that thing, but because we are expecting the thing to do what it isn’t designed to do. Instead we should use each thing according to its own capabilities and capacities, and recognize and appreciate the different ends each one can achieve.

In other words, we need to respect the telos of each object, craft, and institution. Otherwise, we will be like the kid who is frustrated that his tricycle can’t fly; or the writer who struggles to capture a specific story, message, or feeling on the page because he is working within the wrong genre or form; or the newly-elected politician who can’t fulfill his campaign promises within a four-year term because deliberative democracy is necessarily slow. Tricycles are wonderful toys for toddlers, but make for terrible airplanes. Poetry can be a powerful form of communication, but it will serve well only those writers who understand how to tap into what it does best. Deliberative democracy can achieve many good things, but if someone wants to move fast and break things, maybe he should be the CEO of a tech startup instead of a politician.

We can also think about how this principle applies to relationships. Maybe that friendship, marriage, or church is actually doing fine—or as well as could be expected of fallen and finite people. Maybe you are already doing the best you can to be a good friend, spouse, or church member; maybe your friend, spouse, or fellow church member is doing likewise; maybe you aren’t failing them, and they aren’t failing you. Could your uneasiness or dissatisfaction instead stem from expecting these relationship to do for you what only God can do? Are you focused on what these relationships do not and cannot possibly give you instead of attending to and appreciating what they do?