What we can only learn when our spirit is weak

Awareness of my state of attack and weakness was all it took. Bam. Decision time. Time to wrestle this weakness into a time of surrender and wrest back the power God has once-for-all-time secured for me.

As I wrestled with my foes,
I wondered what or who on earth they were.

Spiritual division in the Christian faith. Arguments over right and wrong. The misconstruing of Jesus’ words. The senseless butchery of innocent lives. Self-righteousness in some (including me!) who should know better. The burdens of others that I normally don’t carry that have loomed a little larger of late. The voices of others who are cold. The dissidents. The mind craving present but bombarded between past and future. The confusion in my mind for what to think and communicate, all the while communicating with usual confidence, which has bred cognitive dissonance.

Then I came in my weakness to a long-cherished truth:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
because they’re safe in their reliance on God.

Then I was reminded of another thing. There is an opportunity only found in weakness; when darkness has descended. This opportunity isn’t present when we’re feeling strong.

Again, God turns the world upside down in this knowledge; and in this incredibly vibrant truth.

It was in that moment, where I bristled with a most urgent awareness of my weakness, where I felt every nuance of attack in the moment, that I remembered: it is here, right here, in the midst of my soul’s torment that I see I’ve been teleported to the valley of decision. I remembered that awareness was the golden key. I remembered that insight was God’s gift.

After all, it was insight that brought me
out of my dissociation from the present.

It was insight that brought me to the
sharp realisation of the pain I was bearing.

Indeed, people who struggle with anxiety will not account for the blessed fact that they may have extraordinary insight. It may not feel like a blessing. But that insight is just as easily redeployed in the valley of decision with the addition of courage to go weak through the admission of our weakness. We just have to call it what it is. No more hiding away under the veneer of strength.

It’s not popular to be weak these days. We are much more comfortable being warriors. But it is in becoming weak, as Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, that we derive strength that can only come from God.

There are lessons ahead for us all, and we put these lessons off as much as we can. We all would prefer it to be a different way. Those who deny their weakness never learn the way of the Master.

Anyone who struggles being weak will struggle to live out the radical teachings of Jesus.

When we’re weak spiritually we’re blessed, because standing on our knees is our surrender.

And what confounds the world is that standing on our knees is code for dependence. The person who is utterly dependent on God is safest, indeed most trustworthy, for others. If there was ever a need God had of us, it is our respectful care for all creation.

It is only a person who truly appreciates the need of that care, because they have been cared for in their weakness, who takes hold of that responsibility with the care that befits that role.

It is only the person who is routinely weak who truly knows God. They will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which is code for compassion and empathy and sensitivity and grace.

Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash