Notes on Weakness and Failure

Last updated on: March 18, 2017 at 9:11 am by Anne Kennedy

Notes on Weakness and Failure 2017-03-18T09:11:30-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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There was a brilliant rosy sunrise, which I saw because, you know, the daylight has been saved, that evaporated under the heavy layering of clouds which seems to be our portion for the day. More snow, says my app, because that’s what we really need right now.

I’m sure you enjoy these minute by minute updates about the weather and will be sad when I forget to report about the temperature, precipitation, and cloud cover. People think of the weather as a neutral, easy topic when all else is too controversial. But they didn’t account for me and my bitterness.

So, the house is a wreck. Began to slide slowly into less and less energy as the week went on and finally had to resume the long nap in the afternoon, which meant that I neither read, nor wrote, nor cleaned, nor did anything I wanted to.

Did finish the big fat Miss Read book I was reading, cough. And with the children I finished Story of the World Vol. 1, Famous Men of the Middle Ages, and Anne of Avonlea. The perversity of my soul loves the Famous Men series, put out by Memoria Press. It’s not just that they’re well written, they are, and the history is good, it is, its that they had the gall to call them Famous Men. And sell them on the internet. Heh Heh Heh. In fact, at the end of the Middle Ages book, they have a whole chapter on Joan of Arc and the first paragraph is all about how its ok that she’s in the book, even though she was not a man, because she had a very great important place in French history. Vive Le Patriarchy! It’s these kinds of little things that keep me laughing through the day.

Too bad that I didn’t manage to read anything else. Feel really bad about it. Also didn’t cook anything interesting. Well, did shove a hunk of corn beef in the oven yesterday, with some french fries, because of the Irish. And on Wednesday I baked a vast tray of chicken legs. Not exactly the high point of my culinary existence.

Which is the way it continues to be. Not really sick. Not well enough to do anything interesting. Hanging on to school and the basics at church because that’s all the energy I have. Would like to bitterly cast it up to God, and complain that he is wrecking everything, and why couldn’t he just give me all the energy I need Right Now, or rather, all the energy I would like, which I guess isn’t quite the same thing. But every time I am tempted I happen to bash into texts about the cross, most inconveniently. Am I really going to complain to God, who endured the frailty of human suffering on my behalf, so that that same humanity might go free? Well, actually, yes I am. But maybe not as vociferously as I would like to.

While I was lying around not reading and not cooking and not doing laundry I spent a lot of time thinking about failure, which is one of my favorite things to think about, and how topsy turvy the gospel really is. It’s so perverse that weakness and failure are the two most fertile plains of God’s work, and that I run away from them so desperately. Or, if I can’t get away from them I try to pretend they’re not there, or that they’re not as strong as they are, or that its not that big a deal. The last thing I ever want to do is admit that 1. I have failed and 2. I am weak. The only way I manage to admit weakness and failure is out of the abundance of God’s wretched providence, which carries me past my own true abilities. Honesty prohibits me from taking credit for a functioning household, or a sound mind. It has to come from somewhere. It’s clearly not me. No one would suspect that it did.

Have a lovely day! Or whatever kind of day you want to have. Oh! And next week Christianity Today will be running some of my devotionals. If you haven’t got hold of them but want to know what they’re like, there will be five from the Psalms. I’ll link them up as they appear.

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