Weakness is Strength and Strength is Weakness

While I was daydreaming today, I realized my biggest weakness is also my biggest strength.

If you've ever been through interview coaching, you're familiar with the question "What's your biggest weakness" and you know the strategy is to give quasi-positive trait and spin it to fit the question. For example, you may claim your weakness is being a perfectionist because you always want things to be of high quality. That's how I felt as I sat there thinking on my true weakness.

Photocredit: Unsplash.com/Jens Lelie

My biggest weakness is stubbornness. It's not a learned weakness; I came into this word stubborn. Babies are supposed to be born face down, but for some reason, I really wanted to come in this world face up. The doctor had to flip me over multiple times and even began suggesting a C-Section. Every time the doctor would flip me over, I flipped myself back over. I was determined to do it my way, and knowing what I know about myself now, I suppose the doctor flipping me over only made me more determined to come out the way I wanted. The doctor had to hold me so that I was unable to flip back over as I made my way into the world.

I've witnessed that same stubborn spirit in many of my interactions in life. Whenever people start sentences with "you have to," or "you need to," something in me becomes determined not to do whatever they are suggesting. The more people try to convince me to do it, the more determined I am that I will not. It's a strength, because I never fall into peer pressure, but it's a weakness because that same defiance can lead me away from God. If the Holy Spirit is telling me to do this or that (or to not do this or that), I want to listen! I don't want to be fixed on the way I'm currently living to the point that I become defiant when God is trying to move me.

Yet, I do want to retain my stubbornness. That stubbornness is what will allow me to refuse the devil's temptations when all the world is joining in. It's stubbornness that keeps me from wanting to do what everyone else is doing and makes me content being peculiar. In some cases, like when Daniel refused the meat sacrificed to pagan gods or when Noah built the arc, I want to be stubborn, I need to be stubborn.

For those who aren't vegetarian, can you imagine, suddenly refusing meat on the principle of things? Everyone around you is feasting on steak and chicken, while you try to obey God by eating beans and broccoli. How hard would it be to watch them eating what you are refusing? Would you want to join in?

Can you imagine the jokes made at Noah's expense while he was building the arc? It's middle of the desert and there he was building a boat claiming a flood was going to wipe out the Earth. The people around him must have thought he was insane. Yet, he kept on.

At the end of the day, I want my stubbornness to be a stubbornness for God, not against Him. So what's your weakness? Is it actually a strength in disguise, and how can you wield it for the glory of God's kingdom?