This post was written by Kaden Nelson, a Humanities Center student fellow.
My upbringing in small-town southern Utah brimmed with anxieties about being strong. My first high school job was at the local Ace Hardware, where I would lug eighty-pound bags of concrete, prickly piles of lumber shipments, and slippery barbecue grills of all sizes. Most of my coworkers could haul these things around effortlessly, but I always seemed to be dragging them, huffing, with a stubborn refusal to ask for help. I was terrified of being perceived as feeble. My boss, with only good intentions, once referred to me as a “tender little guy,” a description which haunted me for months. He knew I was fragile, I thought, as if it were a well-kept secret.
As a scrawny teenager, it was not lost on me that most other boys my age had more upper body strength, more athletic talent, and more of an emotional guard than I did. I was consistently picked last for team sports in P.E. Thoughts of inadequacy crept in any time I had to publicly demonstrate my strength––or lack thereof. What did it mean if I was too sensitive and weedy to throw a tight spiral, heft a heavy load, or watch a sad movie without crying? Barring the damage done to my self-perceived masculinity, these experiences left me paralyzed with a heavier, more universal fear: what if I was weak?
Last week, I read “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” by Katherine Mansfield for a course I’m taking on the British modernist short story. At a certain point in the narrative, after the two main characters have lost their gruff, militant father, they decide to confront all of the belongings he left behind. The eldest of the two, Josephine, holds back tears desperately, insisting that it “seems so weak” to snivel over her father’s clothing and trinkets. The younger daughter, Constantia, wisely pushes back against her sister’s fortitude. “Why not be weak for once?” she asks. “Why shouldn’t we be weak for once in our lives? It’s quite excusable. Let’s be weak. It’s much nicer to be weak than to be strong.”
When I read this, my mind was immediately drawn to the prophet Ether’s exchange with God regarding the fallen condition of mortality. “If men come unto me,” the Lord declared, “I will show them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble.” Beyond the simple recognition that all of us possess universal weakness, I am struck by what God says to Ether about how this qualifies us to better receive His grace: “My grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”
The principle at the core of this verse is theologically provocative; God invites us to come unto Him so we can be shown our own weakness, which is given to us intentionally for the development of our humility. But if humility is a prerequisite for us to receive God’s grace and “become strong,” it is clear, then, that we must first be weak. We must first concede to our fragility before God can do anything substantial with it. Most of us conceptualize this process as strengths supplanting weaknesses, but the word “become” implies that our weaknesses may actually be strengths-in-the-making. To our surprise, characteristics that we dismiss as foibles may have the potential, with God’s help, to become strengths, as opposed to being erased and substituted with strength. This framing disrupts the binary, demonstrating, against our oversimplifications, that strength and weakness flow into each other with synergistic, divine energy. It’s as if God is asking us to materialize our weakness––expose it to the warm rays of His love––so that it can be transformed, thus transforming us.
One of the earliest experiences that helped me understand this relationship was when I saw my dad cry for the first time. I was nine years old on a brittle autumn day, with orange leaves and heaps of pine needles masking the yellow-brown lawn in our backyard. Change and discomfort infused the air. I sat on the concrete of our back porch. My little legs sprawled out on the receding lawn as my hand combed through the oily coat of our family dog, Shadow. Three days of poor health––with no signs of getting better––had come and gone. He was feeble, hoarse, barely moving. My parents had made the necessary and impossible decision earlier that day to euthanize him. I insisted on being there to hold him as he passed, and my dad sat with me. Before I knew it, the animal control employee was withdrawing a syringe needle from Shadow’s arm. I swallowed down the lump in my throat, waiting for him to release his final breath. Once he exhaled, I released the tension in my shoulders, fell back into my dad’s chest, and wept.
It was no significant thing that little nine-year-old me cried over the death of a cherished family presence––one who sat eagerly at the back door, tail wagging, tongue loose, ready to be walked after I had just had a bad day at school. His familiar, loving presence had become a staple in our home, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. What was significant, and more precisely, irregular, was the way my dad responded. This toughened police officer, who always seemed to maintain a white-knuckled grasp on the hyper-masculine norms of his 70s and 80s upbringing, who rarely expressed heavy emotions, who insisted often that I learn to throw a ball “less like a girl,” was suddenly crying alongside me. His shoulders shook. His voice trembled as he watched me crumble into soft sobs. He insisted, “It’s going to be okay, bud.” But he knew I wasn’t okay at that moment, and instead of telling me to toughen up, he held me. He held me until I believed him. He held me until I knew that it was going to be okay.
What I loved most about this transient moment with the most stolid paternal figure in my life was his weakness. My dad almost always endured through challenging times with a wall up––a resolute barricade of stoicism. I was touched to witness otherwise. I felt I was less alone, like he was carrying the grief of this loss with me. It was consequential to see him in a moment of vulnerability because it illustrated how weakness can become strength. In some strange way, it was the expression of his own weakness that strengthened me.
While it is true that it requires strength––rather than weakness––to cry, to ask for help, to admit that we can’t do something alone, we exist in a contemporary world that preaches contrary through its demands for our independence. Ambivalently, our current cultural zeitgeist insists that we should be more vulnerable, more open, more honest, while also consigning ourselves to little lives of isolation. Communities around the world continue to compartmentalize as they bow down to the idol of hyper-individualization. Social media content continues to insist that we “owe each other nothing,” that we must be wholly self-sufficient in order to be successful and happy. It would be entirely normal for me to never ask my ministers to give me a blessing when I’m sick. It is oddly easier to take the long, guiltless walk home instead of accepting a ride from a friend. Yes, boundaries and sensitivity are essential, and no one enjoys a consistently needy friend. There is wisdom in self-sufficiency, and it is critically important for us to sustain ourselves off of our own God-given worth, instead of expecting others to generate it for us. But is it possible that we have fetishized self-dependence to an extremity that appears strong, but is entirely hollow, disconnected, and lonely? Is it possible that, in this age, we certainly need to be strong, and we also need to be weak?
I will be the first to admit that I don’t enjoy exposing my own weakness. For the sake of self-preservation, I often find it easier to fix a broken household appliance on my own without asking for help––to tend to emotional scars without the embrace of a loved one. Still, I can’t help but feel that something gets lost when we too often push down what needs to be expressed. Something is squandered when we refuse to let ourselves be weak. We lose opportunities for something powerful, something transformative, when we rely too heavily on ourselves and leave others and God out of the most searing, intimate, delicate parts of our lives. With a barrage of messages telling us to be self-contained, I value Constantia’s invitation to “let [ourselves] be weak.” It is only in granting ourselves the permission to be weak that we can begin to become strong.
