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Wednesday March 18, 2026

When I am weak

“We humans are the negative to God’s positive. No positive can be manifested except by contrast with and absorption of its negative. Each is necessary to the other and belongs to the other as its polar opposite. You cannot know light except in contrast to dark, or soft except in contrast to hard, or yes without no. Light is invisible unless it is reflected against a non-light body, such as the moon or earth, and swallows it up. Then you don’t see the moon but the glory of the light, or the earth except as clothed with all the colors of the light. A soft bed must have a hard framework, but the mattress must conquer the bedstead! Flesh must have bones, a decisive yes derives its strength from a conquest of the alternative no’s. So we are God’s polar opposite. We are the ‘are nots’ in relation to God’s ‘I am.’

Paul speaks of us having ‘this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.’ He so clearly saw this fact and principle, when he told how he had a thorn in the flesh which God did not remove though he besought Him three times. Instead God said, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness’: and Paul added that, therefore, he took actual pleasure in unpleasant situations, ‘infirmities, necessities, distresses, persecutions,’ because ‘when I am weak then am I strong.’

In other words, all our awkward situations and our normal negative reactions to them–dislike, fear, unwillingness, inadequacy, frustration–are the only way we can react as humans. If that is all we are–just humans–then we would be in bad shape, enchained in the prison of our own reactions. But to us who are at home in the fact of the Other Self–the not I, but Christ in me–pressures, trials, temptations are a springboard to faith. We dislike a person, so we take a leap of faith. We move over and say, ‘I don’t like this person, but You are love in me. You love him, so with Your love, I love him.’ Switch on the light, and where is the darkness? So with every kind of negative reaction.”

Taken from: The Spontaneous You

By Norman Grubb

Pages 79-80