“Are you getting impatient with me?” The question was pointed. There was clearly something in my tone that betrayed my feelings!
Much as I tried to cover it with a veneer of kindness, my true attitude was escaping through the cracks. We’d walked this conversation many times. My friend was feeling a familiar sense of being overwhelmed at life, and was expressing worry, fear and catastrophe.
I knew he loved God and wanted to trust Him. But somehow the torrent of concerns, the heightened emotion, his overthinking and misinterpretations of life and others were evoking in me all manner of judgment. Why are you letting this overwhelm you? Could you not have a little more faith? Are you really trusting God? Surely you are mature enough to settle under God’s care? Not that I actually voiced any of that! But how I felt was still being communicated in my approach. The reality was I was struggling to help my brother in his weakness and faintheartedness (1 Thess.5v14).
Weakness – lacking in strength or capacity – is not always easy to identify. Some weakness is more obvious – bodily weakness through sickness, ageing, disability or injury, for example. There is the weakness of faith that can, for example, lead to worry about life’s need. Jesus identifies this weakness when He says “will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith?” (Matt. 6 v30) Here faith is too small, too weak for the size of the need and the size of the God who feeds birds and clothes landscapes. But there is also weakness related more directly to sin – the high priest deals gently with those who are ignorant and going astray because he himself is subject to weakness (Heb. 5v2). There are sins we don’t see and sins we stray into, all needing a sacrifice (5v3).
My friend seemed to be somewhere between feeling the weakness of faith and weakness of the body. He knew the call to trust the Lord, yet faith felt small in the cauldron of pressure. But there was also a sense in which his body was well trained in feeling this way. Felt anxiety could strike unbidden and quickly grow strong, even with a heart turning to the Lord. As body-heart creatures these distinctions can be hard to draw neatly.
Clearly on that occasion I did not respond with such discernment! I was frustrated, disappointed, and looking down on my friend’s weakness. But reflection led me to consider a time when Jesus was faced with the weakness of those nearest to Him. He was in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26v36-46). Experiencing weakness as the cross loomed (2 Cor. 13v4) and engulfed in sorrow, He goes to pray. He wants His disciples’ presence and watchfulness with Him. When He returns to find them sleeping, His initial response could feel like a rebuke. But His next words are more like encouragement and reassurance. “Could you not watch with me one hour?” is literally “did you not have strength of body to watch?” Who could blame them for succumbing to a created bodily need? Luke 22v45 adds sympathetically that they were “exhausted from sorrow”.
Jesus doesn’t condemn the disciples but encourages them that their weakness is an opportunity to seek heaven in the midst of earthly limitations – “watch and pray”. The weakness is not itself sin, but could be an opportunity to enter temptation. And in the midst of weakness that could overwhelm, Jesus recognises a heart turned toward Him – the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Do you hear Jesus’s words? Encouragement, understanding, discernment, grace, patience.
Turns out it was me who was weak, as I too found myself under the burden my friend was carrying. I was also the one needing to watch and pray, to turn the burden to the One who truly carries it and cares for us, and not enter the temptation of frustration. Then the response would be one of care, watchfulness and dependence on the Lord, a response that upholds the weak, and encourages the fainthearted. Pastoral care needs to grow in walking well with weakness, our own included.
