“We had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.” —2 Corinthians 1:9
God allows our weakness not to shame us, but to lead us into the fierce, freeing truth that only grace can carry us. —D.
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It’s in the faltering, in the stumblings, in the losses, in the quiet sins and the loud griefs, that God begins His strange and beautiful work in us. He allows failure to press in, illness to settle, and sorrow to stretch long. Not as punishment from far off, but as a kind of unveiling. Through it, we begin to see the true shape of our weakness. It’s not knowledge we can reach on our own. We need the weight of the world, sometimes, to bring us to that holy seeing. And there, in the ache and the quiet unraveling, God draws us near to the Son, the one who bore our frailty in His own flesh.
This is the wisdom of the cross. The same wisdom that led Jesus into death now teaches us through suffering, through weariness, through the days when strength fails. It is here that the Spirit leads us, not to despair, but to a fierce kind of humility. Not the soft humility of polite religion, but the deep, trembling humility of those who know they cannot breathe without grace. Paul knew it. “We had the sentence of death in ourselves,” he said, “that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.” That’s the gift hidden in the grit: a truth that cannot be shaken, that our strength was never enough, but His always is.
And God, in His mercy, sometimes gives us the clearest kind of sight: the chance to witness just one day in the full light of truth. Not to crush us, but to call us nearer. Watch your mind, your tongue, your hands for one day, and see what God already sees. The wildness of thought, the small betrayals of speech, the shaky, self-defended heart. It’s humbling. And God lets us see it not to accuse, but to draw us again into Jesus. The one who sees it all and still stays. The one whose mercy runs deeper than our worst hours. This is His strange kindness: to strip away every illusion of strength until we stand, empty-handed and wholly known, ready to be filled by grace.