Strength is a heavy thing. If you have held onto it all of your life, you probably don’t know just how heavy it is. There are those who carry strength for so long that their grasp is stuck. I am not one of those people. Today, I have to pick up my strength up off of the floor. I have to massage it gently into my limbs and legs and chest. I hope that I can rub it deep enough to penetrate the bones, the joints, and my heart. All of these things have been aching with weakness, creaking as if to break.

Strength is such a heavy thing. And it is not as necessary as we have been taught. You think that the opposite of strength is weakness and then draw lines around strength and surviving such that weakness equals death. But it doesn’t. And this is one of the deadliest lies. You think that to embrace weakness is to invite death. But weakness is only weakness, the crying out for rest. Without that cry, rest is slow in coming. Without that cry, without that rest, strength begins to consume weakness.

My strength is trying to consume my weakness. If it does, I will never separate them back out again.

Weakness is a gentle thing that stands guard in the passage between strength and death. It utters warnings and cautions that you have found your limit. You can do no more. Indeed, you do not need to do more. Weakness is a thing that the universe understands. It is a limit which God himself respects.

Weakness is such a gentle thing. And that is different than being fragile. Weakness is what invites me to slough off my strength at the end of the day, let it lay beside the night stand, and rest. Weakness is the respite that makes sure that there is strength enough to finish tomorrow.