Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing

by Andy Crouch

Human beings have an indelible sense that our life has a purpose—and a dogged sense that we have not fulfilled our purpose. Something has gone wrong on the way to becoming what we were meant to be, individually and together.

Many simple ideas are simplistic—they filter out too much of reality to be truly useful. This one is not, because it is a particular kind of simple idea, the kind we call a paradox. It holds together two simple truths in a simple relationship, but it generates fruitful tension, complexity and possibility.

Here’s the paradox: flourishing comes from being both strong and weak.

Flourishing requires us to embrace both authority and vulnerability, both capacity and frailty—even, at least in this broken world, both life and death.

Flourishing is not actually the property of an individual at all, no matter how able or disabled. It describes a community.

The question is not whether Angela alone is flourishing or not—the question is whether her presence in our midst leads us to flourishing together.

Think of authority this way: the capacity for meaningful action.

What makes action meaningful? Above all, meaningful action participates in a story. It has a past and a future. Meaningful action does not just come from nowhere, and it does not just vanish in an instant—it takes place in the midst of a story that matters.

The sorrow of the whole human story is not that we have authority, it is the way we have misused and neglected authority.

vulnerability that leads to flourishing. Instead, think of it this way: exposure to meaningful risk.

vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities, never about certainties.

Only human beings live our whole lives able to return to a state that renders us uniquely vulnerable, not just to nature but to one another.

Bones—hard, rigid, strong. Flesh—soft, pliable, vulnerable. We image bearers are bone and flesh—strength and weakness, authority and vulnerability, together.

The most transformative acts of our lives are likely to be the moments when we radically empty ourselves, in the very settings where we would normally be expected to exercise authority.