weakness

My last post was on the concept that muscles grow when they are broken down.  We go to a point of exhaustion, put ourselves into a state of weakness and from that state new muscles are grown.  This makes sense when it comes to muscles and working out, makes sense in that it feels like a concept we are comfortable with in our minds.

Yet, when we take that concept and put it towards other areas I don't believe that the collective we is comfortable with it at all.

I was once talking to a guy about getting out of debt, we were discussing a talking head who advocates taking on a second job so you can get intense about paying off debt.  "That guy hates families." was the comment made about getting a second job.

Now think about that, my friend believed that somebody hated families because they advocated spending less time with your family for a year or two to get totally financially free.  The truth is, if you want to grow financially you are going to have to be broken down somewhere.  Whether that means taking a second job or cutting your spending down to painful levels or selling something you can't live without.  That is what it takes.  And it's not about hating families, its about sacrifice.

But when it comes to our spiritual selves, it makes me uncomfortable to say "I need to put myself in a place of spiritual weakness to get stronger."  Most of the time what we are sacrificing for spiritual growth is control.  When we give up control we feel weak.  And we feel week because we are!

When you take up the discipline of Solitude you are alone, there is nothing to control when you are totally alone.  When you take up the discipline of fasting you are hungry, probably angry if you are like me, and physically weak.  When you take up the discipline of giving you actually have less money in the here and now.  The discipline of worship means putting something ahead of yourself.  You are starting to get the point.

But I am not comfortable with uttering the words "God wants me weak".  We love to say the Biblical principle of "When I am weak he is strong" when we just screwed up in our lives and we want to justify our being a jack head.  But rarely do you hear people say "I will make myself weak so that he will be made strong".  That is really uncomfortable.  I mean it is actually hard to say those things out loud for me.  Try it, unless you are reading this in a cubicle and you'll get fired, then definitely wait for the car ride home to try it.

Weakness is always bad in our current world system.  Always.  When we meet weakness our job is to figure out how to empower somebody so they are no longer weak.  We create giant walls of protection so that our homes, cars and schools are not weak.  I giant amount of the money we spend is so that we can cover the weak links in our lives; we insure our jobs, cars, houses, health, lives, kids, pets, appliances and vacations.  Weakness, even possible weakness not yet realized, is always bad.

But I find myself spiritually following a man who never shied away from weakness.  He fasted for forty days.  He didn't build a house or business for himself but wandered around and slept on couches or outside.  He didn't own anything of consequence.  Every time he built up a strong following he would say something offensive and a majority of them would leave.  He was arrested, beaten and killed in a very public way.  Weakness was not something he was, he said to the most powerful leader he ever met face to face "The only power you have is the power given to you by my father".  Weakness was not something he was, it was something he invited in, something he did not shy away from, it was something he was, dare we say, comfortable being around.

Control and security are the foundations of our current system.  We work hard to keep them there, and we take pills to calm the anxiety we feel when we might be losing them.  Control is a fantasy for us today, but the man I follow had control over the weather, the crowds, the fish, and most importantly, total control over himself.  And he had all of this from apparent places of weakness.

This is something I struggle through, something that is hard to come to grips with.  But it is something I need to work out if I am going to keep believing the things I believe.