Review: Embracing Weakness

Instead of embodying a unitive humility, too many of us Christians instead spend a lot of time and volume on having all of the answers --- that others may or may not want.

Shannon Evans begins her book, Embracing Weakness – The Unlikely Secret to Changing the World, by telling of her great confidence that she knew her mission in life, to serve “a God who would supply me everything I needed,” but it was only a few sentences later when she spoke of her life being in despair, because “Nothing was going the way I had planned.”  Shannon discovers that the fullness of life that God desires for us includes relationships, and she didn’t know how to relate to others except through a position of strength.  She offered her strengths to others without understanding theirs, which were often what she perceived as their weaknesses.  And so, she began a long road to true humility, and true of love neighbor, and true relationships with neighbor and God.

I cried heaving tears on a cool tile not because my (poor) neighbor didn’t know Jesus the way I did. I cried because I didn’t know them like He did.

Every educated Christian will read Shannon’s words and lament: “That’s me.”  We so want to elevate the poor, and forget that Jesus went down to them, “for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  We count as success our giving food to the poor, but in the final chapters we see Shannon having them at her son’s baptism and then at her house for dinner, including the twenty-six-year old grandmother.

And so, we see what “embracing weakness” and loving our neighbor really looks like --- and are humbled.  This is a book to share and discuss, and pray over.

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It was Friday; I had just finished praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary.  On the tiny chapel were pictures of Jesus, Mary, and St. Kolbe, who in a concentration camp during WWII willingly gave up his life for a poor man.  I guess it was appropriate that, as I considered the words of this book on how to embrace weakness, I read the words of St. Kolbe on the topic:

Do well what depends on me, and endure well what does not.
-- That is the total perfection, the source of true happiness in the world.

-          St. Maksymilian Maria Kolbe (1894-1941)