Vulnerability is a paradox.
How much do we share?
We are often trained to suffer in silence, smile through trials, and set our faces like flint. Jesus offers guidance, telling us not to show up somber as a means of showing others and gaining attention for what we endure.
Yet, if we hide or hold back, do we sacrifice our integrity and miss opportunities to relate to and connect with others?
God’s omnipresence cuts through the paradox. Our Father sees and knows everything, so there is nothing we can hide, even if we attempt to. Likewise, Jesus counsels us to go into our room, shut the door, and pray. There, where it is safe, and we are known, loved, and held by God, we can bare everything.
David and Solomon are an interesting example of what God can do with our vulnerability. Solomon, David’s son, inherited his father’s kingdom, and Solomon was concerned that he lacked experience to make sound decisions and fulfill the responsibilities as king.
Solomon went to the Lord’s altar, offered a thousand burnt offerings, and prayed for wisdom and knowledge to lead God’s people. God granted Solomon’s request and filled him with a discerning spirit.
Years before, David, in pouring out his heart and seeking God’s wisdom, wrote in Psalm 40: “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire; my ears You have opened.”
In father and son, we see how the Holy Spirit takes old ways and new intentions and transforms them into something altogether lovely and pure. Solomon’s sacrifices didn’t do it for God, but his vulnerability to confess what he lacked and willingness to listen and be filled.
Perhaps the point of vulnerability is to show up and share, not to be understood, but to better understand how to serve others.
Tension & Timing
I was recently asked what led me to the MBA program at St. Edward’s University, and I said faith, grace, and the comic relief of having God laugh at all my plans.
Life is humbling, and a lesson for me has been to worry less about executing a plan and focus more on following purpose. In a sense, it is the difference between running from the fear of failure and going toward the hope of a future already set in motion.
Mustard seeds of faith bring forward the work and missions entrusted to us, because we are instruments of divine workmanship telling a story that began before we were born and will keep going for many generations.
Mother Teresa said she often felt like a “little pencil” in God’s Hands. God does the thinking that makes the movements and the writing that marks the page.
“I have only to be the pencil,” Mother Teresa said.
Trying to control outcomes only led me to resistance; learning to trust whatever God wills pulls me into a vision beyond my imagination. Similarly, leaning into trust means allowing for a certain degree of tension, which Viktor Frankl said is “indispensable” to mental well-being, because it is the “tension between what one is and what one should become.”
Being the pencil simplifies time and project management to active listening, alertness, and responsiveness for when to thrust left or turn right. The tension tugs into the rhythm of divine timing.
Thus the meek tell mighty stories because when God moves it is always swift.
