Michael J. Buckley on Weakness

For there is a different question, one proper to any form of Christian ministry: Is this person weak enough to be a servant of the gospel of Christ? [81]

What is meant by weakness? Not the experience of sin. Indeed, almost its opposite. Weakness is the experience of a peculiar liability for suffering; a profound sense of inability both to do and to protect; an inability, even after great effort, to author or to perform as we should want, to effect what we had determined; an inability to succeed with the completeness that we might have hoped for. Weakness is the openness to the humiliations and sufferings that issue in the inability to secure one’s own future, to protect ourselves from any adversity, to live with easy clarity and assurance, or to ward off shame, pain, and even interior anguish. [84]

Weakness is the context for the epiphany of the Lord; it is the night in which he appears — not always as felt reassurance, but more often as a hidden power to continue, faithful even when one does not feel the strength, even when fidelity means simply putting one foot in front of the other. [88]

from What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise (Eerdmans, 2016)