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I want to talk about weakness and failure. This is a bit of a personal post for me to write, I guess because we all learn about weakness and failure from ourselves. So I am going to talk about me.
When I was a teenager I used to dream about all the things I’d do for God when I got older. I used to see myself as a missionary overseas revolutionising poverty stricken countries, or doing a talk from a big stage that changed peoples lives. I thought I could start a movement or a church that would be different to many of the dying churches I saw around me. Because I thought that God would do all of this, I didn’t think any of it was big-headed. I mistook a genuine call he did have on my life for a call to success (in the more ‘noble’ spiritual sense, I thought...).
Fast forward a decade. Living for God, it turns out, looks far more like falling apart than it does saving the world. I’m sure you could make what me and Luke do sound glamorous (in a Christian sense anyway!). From the outside it could look like we’re really living for God and have it all sorted. But here’s the reality. I spend most of my days singing nursery rhymes, doing necessary and boring jobs, and catching up on TV series in the evenings. I get asked to do upfront and exciting stuff sometimes, and often I turn it down because I have learned my limits and need to guard against getting ill from anxiety again. I do meet up with a lot of people during the week, but the amount of energy it takes me to do this is so much that I need to crash each evening.
I studied theology. I had a gap year where I read the bible 5 times. I’ve been on mission trips. I have had all of that input and so much desire to help people, and yet I am so held back by all of my weaknesses. There is so much more I could be doing if I wasn’t so anxious and afraid. Every day I feel my brokenness. Every day I feel insecurities creeping up on me. So often I feel inferior.
And this is where God’s sense of humour comes in.
Time and time again, it has been in the mediocrity, in the failure and in the weakness that God has used me. More so than with my strengths. I read recently that you can’t take someone where you yourself haven’t been, and I think this is so true. I could never relate to someone else struggling if I didn’t struggle myself. This is what living for God is supposed to look like so often; weak, understated, mediocre. If it wasn’t like that, we wouldn’t be able to relate to everyone else living normally. It is in the daily persistence of a very normal and broken life that we can find God. It is in wearing our brokenness on the outside that we can help others. It is through feeling fear and doing something anyway that we learn to depend on God. Being godly is not reserved for world changers and those living radically. It is for all of us.
And it is in realising this that I am finding healing. Not because my weaknesses are disappearing, as I’d so often pray that they would, but because I am making peace with them. I am no longer frightened by them, but see that they can give God even more room to work. If we live out of our strengths we are depending on ourselves; if we live out of our weaknesses we have to depend on God. I think we so often wait to become better or more perfect before we move onto something new or take the next step. I don’t think God needs us to do that. I think that when we take something on beyond our capabilities it is when he is given room to step in.
And right now, somehow, I feel so broken and so blessed. I love the simplicity of living life with God. I love the freedom to live each day slow and well. I love the freedom to not have to be a ‘success’. I love the freedom of being able to live with my brokenness and not have to cover it up. So much of the world doesn’t get to live like this. We are so often told that success, friendships, happiness, money and family are the key to life. But if we prop ourselves up on these ‘achievements’ one of them might one day fall. So I choose to prop myself up on my weakness and God’s strength. And ironically, I think this is where the real world-changing happens.
‘So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.’ (2 Corinthians 12:9, 10)
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Thanks for sharing! We are strong only in HIM!!!
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