The Gift of Powerlessness

The Gift of Powerlessness
When I Am Weak, Then I Am Strong

I have two life-long friends dealing with long-term and extremely painful cancer diagnoses. One just got home from the hospital (again) and another is still fighting in the hospital (again).

It’s heartbreaking to watch friends suffer, and to feel so limited in how we can help the people we love. Even though we passionately believe in the power of prayer, these moments can leave us feeling completely powerless to help.

I don’t have clean answers for that kind of suffering. CS Lewis acknowledged that the problem of pain is one of the most compelling challenges to the faith. But maybe there’s something to this whole powerless thing.

A Touch of Grace

If you’re online at all, you’ve probably already seen the flurry of interviews with former Nebraska Senator, Ben Sasse, including this one from 60 Minutes. Regardless of your political proclivities, there’s a core theme in every one of these conversations that hits at something essential.

Sasse wouldn’t wish terminal pancreatic cancer on his worst enemy, but something powerful has happened in him since he got the fatal diagnosis:

“It’s a touch of grace, because it forces me to tell the truth. The lie I want to tell myself is that I’m the center of everything and that I’m going to be around forever. And I can work harder and store up enough that I can atone for my own brokenness. I can’t. So, I hate cancer, but I’m also grateful for it. I tell a lot more truth to myself than I used to.”

Sasse sounds a bit like the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:8-10 (emphasis mine):

“Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me…For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Complete and total dependence on God is actually how we were designed to live. Sin broke that relationship and convinced us we could be strong standing on our own. So in a strange sort of way, anything that restores my posture of dependence on Christ is doing something good in me, even if I would never choose the path that got me there.

I can be paradoxically grateful for it. I can even boast in it. Because awakening to my powerlessness restores me to how I was fashioned and designed to flourish in complete and total dependence on my Maker.

Easy for Me to Say

Perhaps that’s too easy for me to say. I’m not the one lying in a hospital bed or walking alongside a loved one who is enduring chemo treatments, endless surgeries, and experimental clinical trials.

Suffering itself is certainly not good. It’s evil, in fact. While sickness is a result of the Fall and death is vile, offensive, and completely out of line with God’s creative intent, one day death itself will die and all things will be made new. But in this season of the already-but-not-yet, I do know that feeling weak and powerless, and in need of Someone greater than myself, can actually be a gift.

Because there is One greater.

And collapsing on Christ in all our exhaustion and weakness is actually what makes us strong.

Maybe this is where our mission really begins. Not in our strength, but in our dependence. The people we work with, lead, and serve don’t need our strength. They need the Christ we cling to.