Building Strength through Weakness

"It is good that you recognize your weakness.  That keeps you looking to Me, your Strength.  Abundant life is not necessarily health and wealth; it is living in continual dependence on Me."   

~Sarah Young, Jesus Calling  

What a great Lenten reflection this was for me today.  I started the week by staying up until 3 am two nights in a row to finish my last presentation of medical school.  As I finished my last powerpoint slide in the middle of the night, the program crashed, and I lost three hours of changes.  I wanted to scream because I was so tired.  I couldn't imagine how I could stay awake to redo my slides, much less present coherently the next morning and then come home and patiently parent my children with so little sleep in the previous 72 hours.

In that moment, my heart was reminded that this is the season of Lent, the season celebrating strength in weakness, the season extolling patient dependence over self-reliance.   It was for me a moment of choosing to trust in God's sustaining power rather than the adequacy of my ability.  The next morning, as I concluded my presentation in front of the department, there must have been 2 angels holding my eyelids open and 14 bolstering me upright.   When I returned home in the evening to E-Bear and G-Bear, they were blissfully content to snuggle and read with me on the couch, and dinner seemed to come together in a surprisingly collected way.

Oh, how the Lord blessed my trust in Him by blessing a day that could have been filled with setback.   This week, may we recognize the weakness in ourselves and trust in the power of the Lord.  May this season bring us to a point of greater dependence on Him.