“Strength” — A Prose Poem
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| Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash |
It's God.
I thought that to be strong meant to stand boldly, even when your heart is ripping apart. I thought strength meant having walls and pretending you're okay with a smile. I thought strength meant not crying. I thought it meant standing taut as your leg splits open. I thought it meant to pull from something within yourself to make it through. I thought it meant hiding your flaws and pretending that you know how to do things on your own. I am realizing now that this isn't strength. It's unexposed weakness, at times, masking brokenness and instability, dipped in fear. That is the backwards strength of the world.
Strength is recognized by the world as a capacity to hide weakness rooted in self-dependency, a revamp of fear. (Thus, the truth; to be brave is to cry and to show weakness). Wordly wisdom commissions men to find strength in themselves, making mean into trembling cities built on rotting metal. Strength is defined with godly wisdom as the possession of Strength Himself. Godly wisdom invites men to run into God, our Strength, and find rest. In reality, strength is not the quality of hiding weakness, but having Strength externally and internally. If the greatest strength a human can have is to move a vehicle or a thousand pounds with his arms, I am unimpressed. I prefer the Strength who carries men and mothers and me through moments we should never have been able to survive. This Strength comes with grace and mercy in His wings as a hiding place for the human, for to be human is to be weak and dependent. Humans were made to depend, in every sphere, in every capacity, in every situation on God.
My natural response to pain is to run into the arms of God for relief, where I am known and understood and kept safe, listened to and reassured and hidden. What the Psalmist said in Psalm 18:1resounds within my heart. In the true wisdom, like Paul, I will boast in my weakness and cry freely in my pain. I will be honest about my lack of insight that I may receive gentle counsel from the One who is Father and from His wise children likewise, my friends made sisters and brothers by His blood. I will confess my fears that I may be reassured. I will open up to the one whom I will call my home, my husband, and have him hold me, an embodiment of Strength Himself in whom he himself will rest in always. I will allow him a lifelong opportunity to be vulnerable as time proves my accomplice, and be a safe space, cradle his fears with faith; his uncertainties and weaknesses with embrace; his inabilities with reassurance and the encouragement to be human; his soul the way my Father does mine. I will press deeply into the heart of the One who is safety, my Safe Place... I will bare myself vulnerably to the One who knows the body He moulded, the soul He made to depend on Him. My heart will return to the soothing of my Love, my God, Strength.
Psalm 28
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