Our Weakness His Strength

Weaknesses, we all have them. We pinpoint them, agonize over them and then focus on turning them into strengths. We’ve made it human nature to want to be up to snuff. We work tirelessly to improve ourselves to meet the standards of others as well as the standards we place on where we want to be. It’s not a bad thing to work on one’s self. We want to be the best that we can be. We want to offer the best of ourselves to our loved ones, our employers our friends. How can we do that if we walk imperfectly through life with all of these weaknesses bogging us down? Saying to ourselves, I would be better off if only my (said weakness…) wasn’t inhibiting me.
What if we took the emphasis of our energy away from our weaknesses and placed it on our strengths? Let’s think about that for a minute. How much energy do you spend every month, week, day on improving the weakest part of you? What if you took all of the energy from those months, weeks or days spent on your weakness and focused it on harnessing your strengths? What if you decided that you were going to become elite at your God given strength?
I am by no means saying that we should leave our efforts by the waste side when it comes to our weaknesses. They are different for all of us and some need to have a steady hold on them to be able to function in life or even have successful relationships but, should we let them steal every ounce of energy that we have? By doing so we are doing two things: The first is that we are allowing our weaknesses to deplete us. Working on something day in and day out that seemingly is like molasses to change can feel a lot like defeat. Second, by putting all of our attention on our weak spots we are neglecting the very strengths and quite possibly crafts that God has gifted us. Without allowing some of our energy to be focused on that, we remain stagnant, never reaching our full potential. As my son Cohen would put it, we were not born to be “average, but savage!”
They are called weaknesses for a reason. There is someone far better suited to develop them than us. Our weaknesses call us to Him. They defeat us for that reason. Weaknesses bring us to the one that has defeated it all.
If we change our perspective for a minute, we can also say that our weaknesses are , in a sense, strengths. They bring us closer to a powerful, all-knowing, creator of everything, pillar of strength who we call father, God. How can any weakness that we have get the better of us when He is for us. What we may view as a chink in our armor may be the very thing that God has woven into our being that saves our lives. Where we are weak He is strong. We weren’t created to be perfect in our own strength. We were born to live perfectly in His. After all, our biggest weakness leads us to our greatest strength.

Photo Credit: Ben White