Strength

Weak: how do we define this word? Some would define it as emotional in saying that tears are merely liquid weakness, while others would define it as physical, as if not being able to weight lift makes one weak. Two years ago if someone would have asked me to define the word weak, I would have, without hesitation, written my name as the definition. I saw myself as weakness incarnated. As soon as any kind of challenge or struggle arose in my life, I gave up. Weakness and I defined each other; however, this began to change when my sister came in to the picture.

Of course, being my sister, she had always been in the picture. Literally, every picture from our childhood had us doing something ridiculous together in it. We were inseparable. She and I would play with our dolls in the beautiful, handmade dollhouse from our grandparents while she would animatedly tell me of her future life in vivid detail: she would fall in love with and marry a strong and burly man, own an old, Victorian house, and she would have a multitude of kids, always kids.

As she began to grow up, the times spent in the dollhouse gradually came to a halt. We grew apart, but that vision of her future life stuck with me, and soon everything began to fall into place. She had the big, burly husband, the house (although not Victorian), and, to top it all off, she had the baby bump. The vision for her future had now become her reality. But one doctor’s visit later, her reality had morphed into a nightmare.

“A… a what?” My ears picked up the distress in my mom’s voice instantly, and I looked up from my homework as she gently put the phone down and leaned on the kitchen counter for support. Something was wrong.
“Mom…” I said timidly. She took a deep breath and looked up at me with a tear rolling down her cheek. My sister had had a miscarriage, and it took every ounce of my mom’s strength to say it out loud, as if leaving it unsaid made it any less real.

I did not expect to see my sister at church for a while because in my weak little mind it was completely reasonable to be angry with God after what had happened. However, my sister came, and she did not merely come just to come; she had come to worship. This continued Sunday after Sunday through miscarriage after miscarriage, and after her fourth, it seemed as if she was worshipping even more wholeheartedly than she ever had before. How? I kept asking myself. Where did she get this inner strength? When I finally asked her these questions that had been plaguing me, she just smiled and simply said, “Christ. He gives me strength when I am weak.”

This simple Biblical truth that I had learned in Sunday school ten years before, when uttered by my sister, now stared me straight in the face. How could this woman, who had lost four babies in the last two years, remain so strong while I gave up at the simplest challenge? She did it through Christ, of course, and I could do it too. My sister, my wonderful sister, spoke the words that utterly changed my definition of weakness and of myself.
So, what is my definition of weakness now? Weakness is anything in me apart from Christ. He is my strength.