Glorious Weakness By Alia JoySýnishorn

When I Am Weak, He Is Strong

We all want to be able to tell the truth about ourselves and God. Some of us just don’t know we are allowed. There’s power in truth telling, in resurrecting the sunken things and sifting them, a couple good shakes to get the sand out and let the light back in. 

That’s what this week begins for you and me. I’m on this journey with you. I haven’t “arrived” either, so think of me more as a companion than a guide. Our days are broken into four parts: weakness, hope, strength, and glory. This is my story of discovering God in all the places I thought were lacking and seeing how He is good when life is anything but. It’s about the cycles we live in and the stuff that happens not only before you believe, but long after, when you realize that believing, hoping, and knowing God isn’t reciting a sinner’s prayer and calling it good. It’s remaining fluent in our language of hope on an expedition that often feels foreign and hostile.

The miracles and grace I speak of are small in variety. The experiences reveal life, death, and resurrection. They are about finding your way, not always out of the darkness, but through it. This is for everyone who needs to know that being poor in spirit is the richest place of all. That’s where the treasure is buried.

We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reaches toward our car with his cardboard sign. We admire pain only if it’s healed, only if it’s endured with perfect grace, with perfect faith, and never succumbed to in weakness, rants, or curses raised to the heavens.

You need to know right from the start, I am offensive too. We often become offensive to respectable types when we enter into other people’s suffering and brokenness, or divulge our own. Yet, to believe that the experiences we have are valid, that the feelings and expressions of them are true and real and worthy of being listened to, is one of the greatest mercies we offer each other. May we extend mercy to one another as we receive mercy from the God who loves us, made us, and forms our native language of hope.

What makes you feel weak? How do you respond to your weaknesses?