Re-learning old lessons

Friday, April 07, 2006


Collision


She hides.

She hides from the world, she hides from those closest to her, and she even hides from God.

She hides in plain sight. Diverting attention from the things she wants unseen. Masks, disguises, anything to conceal what she doesn’t want seen, doesn’t want known.

She hides behind an image of strength. Strength will hide her fear, her vulnerability, and her weaknesses. Strength is the answer.

And so strength begins to form, strength that has no power behind it. It is a façade, a charade, and yet she begins to believe it is true. The strength hardens her and she begins to think she knows best. The vulnerability and fear fade under the shadows that aren’t even real. Slowly she begins to believe this is her true self: the strong, the untouchable, the proud, and the self sufficient.

Strength is her answer, strength will hide the truth. All this just to hide. Believing in lies because admitting the truth, having it seen and known is unbearable.

But shadows fade, and charades falter.

So the One who made her comes. She stands so proud before Him, sure of who she is, strong in herself. And a great collision occurs, the strength of her against the strength of Him. One is shadow, the other is light.

And in that collision all those things she clung to, all those things she hid behind are torn away, pulled from her grasp. She fights with the strength that she has gained; she fights to remain in shadow, hidden from sight. She fights and she loses and she is left bare, weak, and vulnerable.

The very thing she feared is now the thing she must face.

Her strength became her weakness.

Broken and bare, weak and unworthy, she clings to the only One she can. She clings to the One that sees her for all she is, for everything she has tried to hide. Her tears begin to fall and shame fills her heart, for all that she wanted to keep from Him, He now sees.

And in His embrace she finds strength, not to hide her weakness but to fill it. How wrong she was in her thinking, seeing weakness as something to be ashamed of, as something to hide.

It was weakness that He wanted. It was her weakness that would lead to Him.

She finds that real strength is only really found in weakness and that is the product of surrender. So for her to be truly strong she had to be weak and to be fully weak she must surrender it all.

And so in the surrendering, she finds more than weakness but weakness filled with strength, His strength.

And so she stands once again strong,
not by her own strength,
not covered in shadows.

She stands filled with His strength.
She stands in the light of Him.
She stands because He holds her.


Your grace is sufficient for me
Your strength is made perfect
When I am weak
And all that I cling to
I lay at Your feet
Your grace is sufficient for me
Shane & Shane



But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12: 9-10