Today’s Random Prompt: What, in your opinion, is strength?
Physical strength is obvious; it’s the ability to push one’s body past the limits of normal performance or endurance. It’s usually associated with lifting weights, but it also applies to other feats of strength, like completing a triathlon, which I did 10 years ago. That took every ounce of strength I could muster.
Emotional strength is not something I’m very good at. I tend to either withdraw into silence or try to break the tension with inappropriate humor, neither of which is productive in an emotionally stressful situation. However, this leads me to my actual definition.
Strength is humility.
The world thinks strength is synonymous with concepts like wealth, power, achievement, conquest, and authority. Jesus made it clear that all those achievements were nonsense, and he wasn’t even the first to say so.
King Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes says that all these pursuits are “meaningless…a chasing after the wind.” Jesus echoed that when he taught that “the meek shall inherit the Earth.”
Meek does not mean weak; it means humble. American culture despises humility. It is mocked and ridiculed, even by people who claim religious beliefs. When you examine it, however, you see the true power and strength of humility.
Humility is honesty. It’s saying, “I don’t know everything. I don’t have all the answers. I can’t solve all these problems by myself. I need your help.”
In these simple statements, humility affirms the importance of the human collective. No one person has the strength or wisdom to fix everything that’s broken. We’re all part of a larger whole, and each of us can contribute to creating a better world, but first we have to admit that we cannot do it on our own.
The wealthy and the powerful in America have spent decades of time and billions of dollars convincing the people that individual achievement and rugged individualism were the hallmarks of strength. Our current political, economic, and social condition should be sufficient evidence that those things were clever lies.
Strength comes from humility, which is the first step in realizing we’re all in this together, and progress only begins when we agree to cooperate.
Comments