What if I am not weak enough?  That was the thought that ran through my mind like a freight train on my way to work yesterday.  I was in the middle of a week of working a lot of hours, training for a race and all the other things that I have going on yet in the midst of everything I still couldn’t seem to get rid of this small but screaming uncomfortable ache inside my soul.

For weeks I had been working through this and while I thought it was fading more and more each day what I really longed for was the time that I would wake up and it wouldn’t be there at all. Alas, today as not that day.  But that’s when it hit me.  What if I am not weak enough.

Paul talks about our weaknesses in 2 Corinthians 12:8-10 and I have written about this before but at the very end of verse 10 he says something that I couldn’t get out of my mind.  “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” What if I hold on to this weakness just enough that I think I can get through it more on my own, so that I can feel like I was able to overcome under my own strength.  Here’s the thing however, Paul says right here “for WHEN I am weak THEN I am strong.”  I need to allow myself to admit that I am weak, because then I find that I can get my self out of the way enough that God can work in me.

HE can work his ways in and through me, I am then given the strength to take this on, I am made strong and what happens next?  The when becomes then. When I am sad and upset, frustrated, hurt and insecure I then become strong, loved, understood, respected and secure in who I am.

When I am weak enough, it brings me to a place where while I cannot change the actions or words of others I am made strong in knowing that there is an almighty God who cares for, loves and desires what’s best for me far beyond any thing or any one in this world.  When  I am weak then I am strong…. It’s so easy to sit back and not want to admit our weaknesses.  Or better yet to see them and stand in the way because we think that is when we are made strong.  Like we have the ability to fix it all, or at least somehow that my not sleeping and tears that fall from my eyes will somehow be my strength? It’s not.  It never has been.

In fact, when I have allowed myself to truly be weak enough it’s only then that I can get out of my own way enough to see the strength and power of God coming through.  I just need to stop fighting and be still.  Listen & be weak enough.