I don’t like being weak. One of my earliest recollections of weakness was when I was a toddler. I wetted my pants while someone else was in the bathroom.  I stood in the hallway crying in front of the bathroom door. And instead of being sympathetic, my mother gave me a scolding. It was so unfair! I couldn’t control it. Why was I being punished?

In his recent book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell argues for a reinterpretation of what we consider are advantages or disadvantages in life. So often what we think are insurmountable circumstances become the very thing that enables some people to overcome and succeed. And the things that give us a step up in life actually become our Achilles heel. So the dyslexic learns to compensate for their weakness by excelling in memorization. And military bombardment can actually lead to creating more courageous people (as was the case for Londoners in WWII).

Scripture corroborates the theory, and one needs not look further than Jesus himself. Born into poverty and homelessness, and shortly thereafter living as a refugee and foreigner in Egypt, Jesus was no stranger to weakness. Yet he was not without privilege either. He was still a Jewish man living in a culture that privileges Jewish men. But he used those privileges not only to gain access to places of power, but also to lift up those without it, those living on the margins of early Jewish society. Why? I suppose he had a mandate from his Heavenly Father (Lk 4:18-19). But I suspect it’s because he identified with disadvantaged. He had seen life through the lens of the marginalized, and he stood with them (Lk 6:20-22).