Strength.
It's such an interesting thing to me. I have always tried to be strong, and not only that – I've been encouraged to be. I've lived my whole life tirelessly proving myself to be a strong woman. Well, actually, I was just kind of born that way. Opinionated, loud. Unafraid to speak with a heart for justice and people. Teachers and adults praised me for my boldness. No one ever suggested that I be weaker, that I be a little less forthright or expose my underbelly every now and then.
I was praised for being an impenetrable fortress; I looked great on the outside and guarded myself well from some relational uncertainty, but I guarded a hurting heart that could only heal through risk.
The kind of strength I tried to have doesn’t play well with risk, because risk could show the strength for what it truly is – a weakness. This kind of strength has to be on top all the time, controlling and manipulating everything around it to maintain its identity. It’s fearful and intimidated by everything and everyone.
Risk is at the heart of vulnerability, and there's much talk on the Race about vulnerability – so much so that if you can get away without thinking about it for a day you consider yourself fairly blessed, like finding a penny on heads or a quarter on the ground – it's rare and not necessarily life-changing, but it puts a smile on your face and brightens your day.
Anyway, the whole idea behind vulnerability is that you willingly and purposefully expose your weak areas to someone else, that you let down every guard you have knowing you could be wounded and are all but assenting to the reality that you probably will be wounded.
To a strong person, that's dumb.
And you know, it kind of is.
That is, it's dumb if your main interest is a life of self-protection.
I always thought I was a fairly vulnerable person. I would tell any of my peers my testimony with little more than a flinch. At least I did that when my testimony could be presented in a neat little box, gift-wrapped and perfected, everything solved and in order. I thought I was doing God a favor by pretending that he'd worked everything out in my life and that, even though at one point it wasn't (that was the vulnerable part), everything was just fine now. An authentic part of me wanted to offer the listener hope for his/her story, I think, but that only speaks more to how I strong I thought I had to be, a God-complex and an inherent distrust that God was actually going to come through.
When I realized I couldn't tell anyone certain things on the Race because none of it could be gift-wrapped and I had no answer or resolution to what was happening in my life, I realized I wasn't actually that strong at all.
Much to my horror, I was really, really weak.
The mere thought of how my weakness would make me look made me nauseous – I had built an entire identity on being a strong woman. There were several vulnerable areas of me that I’d swept under the rugs inside my stone fortress of a persona, and I had no idea how to share them with anyone. It would ruin everything I'd always worked to be.
And, even more terrifyingly, people might begin to see that I wasn't as strong as they'd thought. They might see that I was only being self-protective.
Now seven months into the Race, I just think it’s overrated. At least the kind of strength I’d striven to achieve is, the kind that presupposes our ability to be self-sufficient and so eclipses any real space for God to be who he is.
Maybe it dawned on me during one of the thousand team-time conversations about feelings and feedback, but real strength is actually our willingness to be vulnerable – to expose ourselves as undone and imperfect, to highlight our insecurities, to talk about where we need help more than where we’ve been most successful.
To purposefully stop the self-protection.
From someone who used to think she was strong, it’s just absolutely terrifying and awful at first. It gives the people around you the power you’ve worked so hard to retain.
It takes away your control.
And then, when all the defenses are down, the moat’s dried up and the drawbridge to the fortress is lowered, your weakness leaves you hanging in this suspended moment of lifelessness where you’re certain your fortress will be plundered and bootied and that you’re just going to die on the spot.
And all of the sudden, right before you pass out, your weakness lets God be God, verifying Paul’s counter-intuitive declaration that when he is weak, God is strong and so will boast in his weaknesses.
Honestly, you could live a marginally happy life in denial of your weaknesses and protecting yourself from attack, but the downside is that you inadvertently protect yourself from God’s greatest gifts on earth – though our weakness exposes us to danger, it’s also what exposes us to beauty.
Weakness invites deeper relational intimacy, offers others the opportunity to love us. It grows our capacity to love others. It creates community, proves that we were created for each other and for God and – my favorite – proves grace.
Weakness is the breeding ground for grace. Grace enables us to exist, to breathe, and grace is God’s love, smiling.
If we walk around feigning strength, how could we ever know the richness of grace? As I’ve learned to stop pretending to be so strong, my eyes have opened to what grace really must be, how big it is and how far it must reach, and grace is truly the greatest thing I’ve ever heard about. It literally blows my mind.
Ultimately, self-protective strength keeps us from the fullness of God’s love. It convinces us we don’t need it. It makes us miserable on the inside, because we’re all born with a sense that something might not be right and love is the only answer to that kind of question.
At this point, I’d rather be weak and have you with me to walk alongside me than pretend I’m fine and have no one to help when things fall apart.
And like I said, strength is just so overrated.
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