Discover your Strength in Weakness

Discovering strength in weakness is a key part of our spiritual growth. Dave Simpson explains why.

No matter who we are we all have weaknesses and none of us are immune to things going wrong – even Facebook, one of the most powerful and wealthy companies in the world.

During their recent outage, which saw Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp all going down, they were inaccessible to users around the world for several hours. With so many people using these platforms all day, every day, that’s quite a problem.

The same week as this happened we at Cross Rhythms Plymouth experienced some technical difficulties with our transmitter. It is a vital piece of kit which broadcasts our FM stream.

As I write this we’re working hard to resolve the problem but, like the Facebook outage, this was unexpected and not something we foresaw.

It made me think about the weaknesses in our lives. Those things that we know might cause things to go wrong for us. It might be we’re prone to certain behaviours that we know are unhelpful. Possibly an addiction that we keep hidden but could surface at any time and derail our lives.

In general we don’t like to stop and think about our weaknesses. We’d rather focus on what we’re good at and where we know we are strong.

Being self-aware enough to know our weaknesses is vital if we want to thrive. It’s only then that we can do something about them and, in many cases, get the help we need with them.

Taking addiction as an example: so many ex-addicts will talk about the value of sharing their struggles with other people who are seeking a way to deal with the same weakness. We’ve interviewed people from Alcoholics Anonymous and they said exactly that. You can listen to that interview and others on the listen again pages at crossrhythms.co.uk/plymouth.  They prove that when we face our weaknesses we can find strength.

Strength in Weakness

There is a quote in the bible which states that God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. An interesting statement which says to me that there is divine help available to us if we are willing to be honest with ourselves and God about our weaknesses.

So why not take the time to think about your life and the areas that you know are weak. Perhaps there is someone you can share these with whom you know is likely to want to help or give you good advice. Maybe even take these things to God in prayer and see what happens.

As these Cross Rhythms Experience articles have been written over the years we’ve often mentioned Cross Rhythms Plymouth and I hope that you may have listened and enjoyed it as a result. In the spirit of acknowledging our weaknesses it seems right I share that it is a charity run community radio station with only a small team behind it and a limited budget. When it comes to broadcasting all day everyday this can be a weakness, especially when we find ourselves with equipment failures like those mentioned! If you like the station and want to help in this, please email me on dave@crplymouth.co.uk.