When, for one reason or another, we continue our attempt to overthrow the weaknesses God has given to us, even after all reasonable efforts have failed, we are probably being driven less by faith than by discontentment. And discontentment never did anyone good. If persisted in, we risk spending years of our lives trying to become someone God never made us to be.

For a few weeks during my freshman year of college, I was a man at war.

You could find me in the campus library, hunched over a book, my fingers furiously scanning the page. Never had anyone consumed Victorian literature and oceanography textbooks so quickly, so intensely. Nor, perhaps, had anyone retained so little.

The path was well-worn. As with so many other students of merely average reading abilities, I was working to master the art of speed. And, along with the majority, my reading legs eventually couldn’t handle the sprint, and I returned to walking through books.

Looking back, those weeks appear to me now as a skirmish in a larger war — one I’ve been waging for a long time, one many of us give our whole lives to. Too often, we spend our days on the battlefield, waging war against our own weaknesses.

At War with Weakness

By weaknesses, I mean those parts of us that keep us from doing what we want to do or being who we want to be. Unlike sins, weaknesses are morally neutral, traits that usually do not (and need not) change as God’s grace renovates us.

We are, for example, not as intelligent as we wish we were, not as athletic, not as good-looking, not as musically gifted, not as charismatic in front of a crowd, not as witty, not as productive, not as skilled at leading, not as fast at reading, not as creative in writing. Although some of these weaknesses yield to disciplined attempts to overcome them, many of them are firm as a rock face. We may push, strain, and put our shoulder into it with a running start, but we find over time that the rock is going nowhere. This weakness is our lot.

Our war with such weaknesses is understandable. The tamest of them can be embarrassing — the sort of thing that gets you laughed at in middle school. The worst of them can act like a collapsed bridge, keeping you from the only road you ever wanted to take in life. So, instead of learning to boast in our God-given thorns (2 Corinthians 12:9–10), many of us spend our time, energy, and money trying to pull them out.

But Christians need not fight a war we cannot win. While many in the world respond to weakness by gathering more troops for battle, Christians remember that some weaknesses are there not to be warred against, but to be welcomed.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Weak

God, in his good creation and providence, sends us into this world beset with weaknesses. “Who has made man’s mouth?” he asks Moses, the meekest of men with the weakest of speech. “Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (Exodus 4:11). What’s true of our mouths, ears, and eyes is true of the rest of us. None of our weaknesses escaped God’s notice when he stitched us together in our mother’s womb. We are fearfully and wonderfully weak (Psalm 139:13–14).

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