“The road of weakness, it turns out, leads straight into waiting. It’s a painful place to be. It’s one we’d never choose on our own.”- Ann Swindell
As Ann Swindell continues Chapter 2 of Still Waiting, she confesses she had to stop trying to make herself better. Rather, she needed to wait. Or, as she states more honestly, she was forced to wait. Thus, Ann learned to wait for Someone stronger than herself to move on her behalf.
In other words, weakness makes us stop, forcing us to wait for Someone bigger than us to fix what’s broken. Or to right a wrong. Yet, on days where weakness dominates our thoughts, we often wonder what happened to God. As a result, our wonder reveals a disconnect between our cognitive knowledge of God’s goodness and strength and our experiential reality.
However, Ann observes, God seems to embrace – even value – weakness. In fact, the author adds:
” . . . in Jesus we see the valuing of our frailty — of our flesh — with heavenly fervor. He became human. He didn’t step into our flesh the way someone puts on a business suit, as something he could take off at the end of the day. Instead, the God of the universe . . . became embodied. . . . He knew hunger and thirst (see Matthew 4:1-4), perhaps one of the ultimate signs of our weakness and dependence on things outside of our control. And he did not despise our flesh.”
Therefore, Jesus entered into our weakness, rather than seeing it as something to avoid. In contrast, Ann notes, we tend to look at weakness as something that slows us down or holds us back. Unlike God, we equate weakness with evil.
Today’s question: What Scriptures lead you away from the road of weakness? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: the annotated bibliography of I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me