Room for Weakness

Two weeks ago at a New Year’s Eve party, I bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while, a fellow pilgrim on the road of depression. He had been through a significant crisis and an in-patient treatment program a couple years back, and I was delighted to hear from him how well he’d been doing recently, connecting more deeply with his church community and holding a steady job with an even better prospect on the horizon.

He in turn asked me about my mental health, and I said, “The depression hasn’t been so bad this year, but January and February are often the worst for me, so we’ll see what happens. At least now I know to expect it! If it is bad, I’ll be okay with cutting myself some slack in terms of my work output on the gray days.”

So I said, but secretly I harbored a hope that maybe this time around, I could just “skip” seasonal depression. No such luck. Like clockwork, the winter glum hit in the middle of my first week back at work after the holidays. Time to get out the sunshine lamp!

My seasonal depression reminds me of my limitations. I slow down. Smaller projects get pushed to the side. I get through less of my to-do list each day. I feel weak.

At work, it’s easy to feel like there’s no room for weakness. We have to clock the hours to get our projects through the system. We have to stay on top of constantly evolving technologies to stay relevant. We have to hustle.

Weakness is also hard to find—or at least to talk about—when we’re celebrating. We applaud those who are successful, who project strength. We want to win. We want to be strong.

But what if it was okay to be weak? What if there was room for weakness, for limitations, for flaws?

The Hebrew book of prayer-songs called the Psalms gives us an image of God embracing us in all our limitations:

The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him. For he knows how weak we are; he remembers we are only dust.

Psalm 103:13-14 NLT

Saying “we are only dust” doesn’t sound like a compliment. But it’s true. Our bodies will decay some day, and turn back to the earth. Until then, we can only go as far and as fast as our lungs can breathe and our hearts can beat. We are not superheroes. We are not always strong.

If it’s true that there’s a good God who will show compassion to us just the way we are, we don’t need to be strong all the time. There’s room, in his care, for us to be weak.

In your life, is there room for you to be weak? Why or why not?

What do you make of this image of a “tender and compassionate” God?