tumblng ground of the threshng floor

this was too beautiful of a post.  thank you for giving wings to our hearts and boasts to our weaknesses, steph!  …and stephs mom!!

thethousandthgirl:

My mother is one of the weakest women I know.  

She is not a vivacious host (though she is certainly a gracious one). In fact, she can’t even throw a simple get-together without getting extremely stressed out. She isn’t a “supermom”; she’s never gotten involved with the PTA or been heavily involved in the community. She needs about 2 hours of rest for every hour of activity, which leads her being able to handle one “activity” per day. She starts to shut down at 9:30pm. She is not naturally organized. She’s not an eloquent writer or a compelling speaker.

And yet. And yet.

When you talk to her, your heart blazes with love for Jesus. Every single time you come away loving Him more. She spends so much time just sitting there, quiet, at His feet. She inclines her ear to His call and praises Him for His lovingkindness, morning after morning, in her off-key voice. I remember asking my mother once: “Mom, how can you do that? How can you pray for hours and hours? You’re so spiritual, so strong!” What she said in reply, I will never forget. “Strong, Stephanie? No. You’ve got it all wrong. I pray so much more than others because I am so weak.” My mother does not pray constantly because she is so self-disciplined. She prays because she is so undisciplined, and thus has to ask Him for grace. She does not pray more to appear holy in front of people. She prays because she needs to ask for strength to interact with them. She prays because she has learned what it truly means to be weak, the crushed fragrance of her surrender coming up so sweetly to the Lord.

So what can we learn from my amazing, radical, oh so weak mother?

I say “radical” because she, unlike the rest of the world, has not pushed her weakness away in disgust. The world hates weakness, in any way, shape and form. And moving past the obvious social “weaknesses” that the world despises: the homeless, the poor, the orphan, we cannot ever forget that the most despised weakness is the weakness we see in ourselves.

Because don’t most of us, even in the Church, try to do it, do life, in our own strength? Our mouths spew things like I feel like God is telling me…or I think the Lord is leading me…but our desperate actions and their pathetic results show that we’re no better than the rest of the world, struggling to make it on our own. We do not look at weakness as a divine invitation to communion. We see it as something to be fixed; something to be remedied.

Oh, I praise You Lord, for giving me such a weak mother, that I might learn from her example!

  My mother’s life is a resounding cry of Be weak! Be weak! Be weak! It’s a call to stop struggling against your shortcomings and ”have-nots” and let your weakness lead you into greater intimacy with Him. Drop the front, friends! Rip off the mask! Aren’t you suffocating under there, pretending to be strong, barely hanging on and daily crushed with the weight of knowing that no matter what you do, it’ll never be enough?

Realize that God isn’t looking for strong people. He’s looking for weak people.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)