When Strength Becomes A Weakness

Rev. Dr. Alfonso Wyatt

            Please be aware that your strength can become a weakness. Does this sound like an oxymoron to you? It is possible for the gift that makes you a strong individual, spouse, friend, or leader to fail, leaving you in an undesirable space. This paradoxical strength-to-weakness shift can derail even the best-intended efforts. You may have experienced this phenomenon and were not aware of what was happening. If this is not registering for you, please read on as we go deeper.

Strength To Weakness Mini-Case Analysis

• You are known as the “go-to” problem-solver. Your phone is always ringing, chirping, and vibrating day into night. You never refuse a request to help others until you sadly discover you have no strength for yourself. You begin to step back from the crowd, a behavior that counters how others know you. The family and friends who depend on you are concerned that their warrior has become a worrier. You, the once strong person, do not have anyone to reach out to for help because you never needed to cultivate a personal support system. Your strength has become your weakness.

• You are a visionary known for clearly seeing what others fail to glimpse. You tend to attract other visionaries-in-training around you. Words like intuitive, brilliant, and profound strengthen your desire to see more possibilities. You love seeing visions and having dreams, but you do not love doing the work it takes to make dreams become reality. You have resigned yourself to fall in love with the next great idea—and consequently, nothing is accomplished. Your strength has become your weakness.

• You have been an “earth angel” to others through your generous offering of your time, talent, and treasure. You will give your last dollar to a stranger. Giving makes you feel better about yourself and the world. A series of unforeseen incidents now render you in dire need of assistance. In your forced solitude, it has become clear that while you are adept at giving to others, you never learned how to give to yourself. You do not know where to turn or how to ask for help. Your strength has become your weakness.

Finding people who love talking about their strengths is relatively easy. We can find “strengtheners” sharing their prowess and success on their blogs, websites, social media, or via old-fashioned one-sided conversations. What is hard to find are people strong enough to admit they have a weakness. Before you look around for others who may have succumbed to this heretofore-undiagnosed strength-to-weakness malady, look at yourself. Has your strength ever become a weakness? When did it happen? How did it happen? What did you do, if anything, to keep it from happening again?

If you see weakness only as a personal failure and not an opportunity to learn and grow, you may continue taking desperate actions in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Your fighting spirit will not allow you to back up, give up, look up, or be self-reflective. You are so used to being right it never comes to your mind that you cannot figure a way out of your present pressing situation. Your strength has become your weakness.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power[a] is made perfect in weakness.” So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.2 Corinthians 12:9