Be Open about Weakness? ...

Wednesday, Sept 5, 2012. We have been talking about weakness over the past days. But how open should you be to talk about your weaknesses? We live in an environment, which might well use our weaknesses for their own good. When you are in the middle of a fight, your opponent will probably use your weaknesses to win!

How open should you be? …

We might think that it is not the best idea, to bee too open about weakness in a secular business environment. There is a lot of competition, and when you tell others what you cannot do or where you have difficulties, then they can and probably will use it for whatever they want to achieve or do.

There is this competitive view into our world, which many people have, and which controls our behavioral patterns. But it is not everything! Every group which wants to reach a goal, needs to get together and sort out strength and weaknesses. It is an important skill for a leader to see the strength and weaknesses of his people, and bring everyone together to reach the goals of the group. Here, we have another view, not the competition view, but the collaboration view.

There is even more to this discussion. There is the social view. There is the component of our wider life environment. We all are more than just the tasks which our business has. We have families, we need leisure and free time. We need to have some house or flat and need to be together with friends, family and neighbors. A business which ignores the social dimension will not succeed - employees will leave after a while! An in the social dimension, weaknesses and strength play an important role as well - and cannot be ignored or covered.

Open before the Lord …

To complete the picture about openness and weaknesses we need to look into another dimension: the spiritual dimension. The Lord knows us completely. We cannot hide before him. We can try to cover things or try to pretend to be what we are not. But he sees all our efforts. And more than we see it he knows all our weaknesses, all our failures, he knows us being lost without his mercy and love.

So we can be completely open before the Lord. We can talk about our strength. We can talk about our weaknesses. We can discover our own fears. We are invited to a community with the Lord which is based on complete truth and on complete openness. He knows us and he loves us as we are (though he might not love everything we do).

The kingdom of God is a strong counterpart to the kingdom of this world, where weaknesses are misused and weakness needs to be covered. In his presence, this cover is not necessary. In his presence, we are save. In his presence, he complements our weaknesses by the strength of others, such that we all can be one in him, a true team, a real community. This is called the community of the faithful! In his presence trust will reign. It is really an important point to see the tension which is there between the danger of openness in this world and the need for full openness in the presence of the Lord and his people. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts