“And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10) “And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.” (Ether 12:27). My whole life I have misunderstood the Lord’s promise that He will “make weak things become strong.” I always have assumed that if I come unto the Lord, and humble myself before Him, and have faith in Him, then He will make me, the weak thing, become strong in my own right. That He will transform my own weakness into my own strength. But that’s not it at all. The Lord does not remove our weakness. He fills us with His grace and His power that we may go forth in the Strength of the Lord. When we are filled with the Lord’s power, we are strong, not in and of ourselves, but because we have been temporarily given His strength. Our own innate weakness remains. Our own necessity to come continually before Him and continually humble ourselves and exercise faith in Him remains. It may seem unfair and even cruel that the Lord will not remove our own weakness and replace it with our own strength. It may even seem that the Lord has some perverse desire to keep us down in the dirt and utterly dependent on His help and completely powerless in our own right. But the Lord says, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” This is not a matter of dependency but of interdependency. It is not a completely one way street. God can’t move across the face of the Earth in all of His power and glory without destroying the agency and the possibility of faith in His children. But neither does He wish to sit on His hands and do nothing as we struggle through a broken and fallen world and often make choices that tend to break the world even further. The answer is to give us weakness that we may have the humility to come unto Him and accept His grace and be filled with His power and to go forth with faith in the Strength of the Lord and while remaining weak things nevertheless being strong. In this way, Christ can act through us to bring about His designs in a way that blesses and enriches our lives without robbing us of our agency and our capacity to act in faith and hope and charity. We long to be independent. We long to become strong in our own right, to shake off the dust and the chains that weigh us down and to go forth with power and purpose. But God is not strong because He acts independently and alone. He is strong because He puts His faith in His weak and fallible children, forgiving them when they err and filling them with His grace when they come to Him with humble hearts and big dreams. We cannot become perfect without Christ’s strength, and Christ’s strength cannot be made perfect without our weakness. A lot of us are anxious to shed our weakness because we feel like we are parasites, living off of the Blood of Christ without offering anything in return. But we are in a symbiotic relationship with our Savior. It may seem strange, impossible even, but He needs us just as we need Him. His work and His glory cannot be accomplished without us. I hope that we can learn to embrace our weakness as an integral part not only of ourselves but also of our Heavenly Father’s great Plan of Salvation and that we can come to grips with the reality that our weakness will not be removed from us during this lifetime. Every time we face infirmities, reproaches, necessities, persecutions, and distresses, we can do so with anger and bitterness and a futile pursuit to divest ourselves of our inherent, inalienable weakness, or we can suffer such things for Christ’s sake, knowing that it is only through our weakness that His strength can be made perfect, and that while our weakness will never go away, neither will His grace go away so long as we anchor our humility, our faith, and our hope in Him and His promise that He will make weak things strong, again and again and again, as often as we need His strength.
