Know The Value Of Strength, And Know Compassion

“Because the strong man who has known power all his life may lose respect for that power, but a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion” - Dr. Abraham Erskine in Captain America: The First Avenger. Some things in life come easy to us. We don’t really think about them. We just do them and they are easy and we have time left over to sit and judge people who can’t figure it out. But some things in life don’t come easy to us. We struggle, we sweat and we bleed and we weep and we give everything we have and we still come up short. If we’re lucky, we have the faith and the humility and the grit to try it again. And then try it again. And through much patience on our part and through the grace of God, we may yet succeed in the end. And if eventually we do develop the strength and power that we so long struggled for, when things finally start to come a little easier, we are unlikely to take our hard won strength for granted. We have earned this through great labor and hard sacrifice and much pain and we aren’t likely to forget the value of this hard won strength. But that is not all. If now it is easier for us, we still remember when it was hard. And when we see others struggling with the same kind of issues that used to weigh so heavily on us, we can’t help but feel compassion. We can’t help but remember when we were exactly in their shoes, knew exactly the pain and the loneliness and the despair that they felt. We can not sit idly by and watch them struggle because we know that we would have given anything for a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on. God gives us weaknesses so that we can know the value of strength, and so that He can make us strong who once were weak, not just because He wants us to be strong for our own sakes, but so that we can have compassion and run to help those who are as weak as we once were, so that we may succor the weak, lift up the hands that hang down and strengthen feeble knees.