The Paradox of Strengths

For the past nine months Greenville College has been talking a lot about strengths. Last fall, for the first time, all of you freshmen were invited to take a test created by the Gallup Organization which seeks to find out what special abilities each of you has. Unlike some of the other popular personality tests, it was developed by empirical research asking hundreds of successful people questions of many many kinds. From their answers, patterns emerged which seem to tell us what answers are given by people of which proven strengths. Then last fall, the Foundation for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education gave us hundreds of thousands of dollars to see if we can use this tool to do a better job of matching you to your major and even your choice of initial career by paying attention to those strengths.

This is a theme which most certainly fits with our college mission to transform each of you for lives of character and service because there can be no better way to help you develop than by recognizing and building on the strengths you already have. But this effort also certainly fits the mission of the Church of Christ, because the Bible tells us that the Church is to be modeled after the Body of Christ, and like any body, its ability to function depends on each part doing what it does best, working cooperatively, held together by a spirit of common purpose, guided by its head. So for Greenville College to help you find your strengths will grow you individually, but will also build the Body of Christ.

When I took the Strengths Finder last fall, I was told my strengths are, communication, strategic thinking, ideation, self-assurance, and command. I hope you remember yours freshmen. Along with this report came two lessons which have helped me and I would like to share them with you.

First, I was told that sometimes people make fun of our strengths and it cripples us into thinking we are inadequate. I understand that well from personal experience. Maybe you have felt this too. For example, as a young man I always felt pleased to be able to command, take charge and give direction. It seemed natural. But then for many years my surrounding culture, especially Christian culture taught me this behavior was sinful. Good people were servants and somehow you could not serve if you commanded. After a number of years of serious self-doubt, and conflicted feelings, I came to understand it is okay to be who God made us to be, so long as our heart is right. Motives and character count. So we must all beware of those who would turn our strengths against us, crippling those strengths by forcing them into reclusion or inactivity.

But we must also beware of our strengths themselves. For paradoxically, our greatest strengths can also be our greatest weaknesses. This second lesson, this paradox of strengths, is the lesson I want you to think about with me for a few minutes.

The night before last I witnessed first hand what happens when a body become divided against itself. When our strength can paradoxically become a weakness. My father was 78 years old. For all those years, the parts of his body had mostly worked together. Of course there were the obvious exceptions; for example at times in 1944 when lack of coordination on the GC basketball court moved his arms one way when the ball needed to go another. But beginning two years ago, the cancer that began to grow in his body, gradually turned his own cells against him. By last Sunday, cells were no longer cooperating, no longer taking "orders" from the brain, or even following the genetic instructions which for all those years had guided the duplication of cells in appropriate places and appropriate numbers. The genetic "scripture" had been violated and the coordinating mind was being disregarded.

The result was the uncontrolled duplication of cells in his chest, tumor growth, which in turn selfishly drew fluids from every other part of his body, failing to allow those fluid cells to do their work in other places. While those fluids would normally provide added resources in times of trouble, a strength to combat disease or weakness, under these circumstances, in the presence of the outbreak of biological civil war, the strength itself became a weakness. The accumulated fluids filled his chest, reducing his ability to provide fresh oxygen to his body elsewhere. In response, his brain called on his heart to do more and more and more, pumping faster and faster to push more blood through the restricted lungs, snatching what oxygen was available.

By Sunday night, his pulse was at 150, not much for a young athlete, but for someone his age, it was a taxing workout, that went on hour after hour. It was by comparison as if one of you ran full speed for two days without stopping. His heart never failed him. But the lack of oxygen exchange meant blood cargo cars ran empty to the brain, and eventually shut down the very brain sending those desperate messages for help to the loyal hard working heart. My father died at 11:27 p.m. victim of fluid friends turned enemies, a strength turned against himself. He was a man of God, a Greenville alum, and my greatest earthly inspiration of what it means to be a man of character and service.

I think there are a lifetime's worth of sermons buried in that story; or maybe they just jump out at me because I need their lessons so much. The heart needs the head as much as the head needs the heart. Our lives must be ordered by the design structured in our creation. Whether genetic DNA or Biblical truth, if we disregard that code of life, we risk the biological or spiritual civil war that destroys us from the inside out. But the one I want to underscore, is the paradox that our strengths may be our weaknesses. Put in a nutshell, my point to you today is never to forget that our strengths and our weaknesses are often flip sides of the same coin.

Let me try to illustrate. I have already said one of my strengths is command. I am told it is useful to have someone with this strength around in a time of crisis. But the "flip side" of that is that often that decisiveness becomes abruptness and insensitivity to others. I see it hurt other people and I am sorry. I'm also told one of my strengths is communication. But the "flip side" of that is that I'm aware that often I don't listen well enough. Unfortunately, I could go on. So the irony is that it is precisely the things which we have to contribute that can end up becoming our weaknesses and rendering our efforts less effective.

The Bible is full of examples. In the words of Oswald Chambers, in My Utmost for His Highest (April 19) "The Bible characters fell on their strong points, never their weak ones." Several cases come to mind, and I am sure you could easily add to the list.

Take Moses. His sense of justice was clearly a strength. He was outraged at the way his people were treated by the Egyptians. Unfortunately, this strength led to his murder of the Egyptian taskmaster. Fortunately, this strength also drove the passion of his defiance of the Pharoah, leading eventually to his leadership of the exodus of his people into liberty. But in the end, this same strength, this passion for justice, drove him to an anger with the people at Meribah that overrode his willingness to listen to the Lord's instructions, prompted him to take matters into his own hands, and in his disobedience denied him access ultimately even to the promised land itself.

Or take David. Now here was a man of action. His strength was his "can do attitude." What else prompts a young boy to stand up to a lion, a bear, and even a giant when others shrink back in fear. No theorizing here. No committee work needed. Just the bottom line please. Yet when his passion for Bathsheba surfaced, his "can do" attitude convinced him he "could do" with her whatever he wanted, and the consequence was murder and adultery.

Or what about Peter. Peter's strength was his courage. This man was simply unafraid. What else prompts someone to leap from a boat to walk on water? What else makes a life-time jew even consider eating what was unclean, associating with gentiles, and thereby making it possible for each one of us to stand in relation to God through Christ, by encouraging Paul's ministry and the teachings of salvation by grace not works. But wasn't it also Peter's lack of fear that made him leap to cut the ear from Caiaphas' servant in the garden of Gethsemane? And how ironic that this act arising out of his "strength" led only minutes later to his groveling cowardice in the face of no more than a mere maiden in the high priest's courtyard. Our strengths not only become our weaknesses but they turn upon us and become our worst enemies.

Unchecked, and fueled by the cancer of our sinful nature, our strengths turn upon us too, making our lives lives of spiritual civil war.

I wish I could say there is some easy fix to this dilemma. But like most of the paradoxes I've tried to describe to you in chapels over the course of two years, this one too does not submit to easy solutions. I think the tension, the paradox, between recognizing, affirming, and exercising our strengths, while avoiding the dangers they pose, is a tension we must all face every day of our lives. It is in fact the very stuff of life that we must grapple with this dilemma from youth to old age and even to death. As Chambers puts it, "Unguarded strength is double weakness."

Spring is the season of hope. So let us remain alert. And most of all, let us remember, "'Kept by the power of God' that is the only safety."

Dr. James Mannoia, Jr.