Strength

In the wake of November’s heady start,  with mid-term elections and Presidential controversies,  gun violence and wildfires, there is time now for a moment of quiet.  It is time to consider who and what we are, what we value and how we live.  It is time to reclaim a deeper identity: who we are as human beings.  

Nobility, after all, rests somewhere within each of us.  Now is the time to draw on our better selves, to trust in the grace of mystery and to remember that it is when we are powerless that we are strong.  

Strength is a grace that is birthed within and manifest without:  it is a connection to something greater than self.  Strength is not born of ignorance but of experience;  it is nurtured not simply by hope but by action.   Strength is the moment of realizing the more within, that there is something other than what we knew before within each of us. Strength is the sense that life is difficult; it is meant to be negotiated and there are moments of failure along with moments of triumph.  

We are capable of being better than we were, more than we are, in the awareness that being human is not actually about one person.  It is about all of us, together, with weaknesses and strengths, mores and norms, values and choices.  Strength is the understanding that human is not done alone.  Human is done in concert, as part of a symphony of reality, and a horizon of hope.  To be human is to acknowledge limits and failures, to strive to be more.  To know strength is to realize weakness.  Strength admits that we are better together than totally alone.  Strength trusts that there is universe beyond this, and there are moments when grace floods into fear, weakness, sorrow, despair, brokenness.  Strength is other; it is the promise of a God who asks only for awareness.  It is the mark of the Spirit;  it belongs not only to the Letters of Paul or the confines of Scripture stories.  Strength is about learning to live in balance in a world of clashing controversy and weeping with conflicts.