Well, the Tennessean asked me to write a first-person essay for their Faith and Values page which will run tomorrow, but I thought I’d give my Faith at the Front readers a first look. This is a topic I’ve talked a bit on this blog, but I’ve been thinking and processing it a lot more off-line. I will add the link if it’s available after tomorrow. It’s a very transparent piece for me, but one of my greatest desires I’m finding is to be authentic. I hope it will touch someone else who is struggling.

The Strength We Find in Our Weaknesses

By Sara Horn

I have always considered myself strong and independent. Yet as the wife of a military reservist currently deployed to Iraq, I have seen that layer of strength chipped away at times this year. Fears, worries, and just plain exhaustion from trying to do it all myself have sometimes worn me down. I don’t always feel so strong anymore.

Just as my husband has an honor code, along with the men and women with whom he serves, so do military spouses, though ours is unwritten. We are the strong ones. We hold up our spouses, our children, our houses, our jobs – we are the glue that keeps everything together. But even glue can sometimes weaken.

My faith in God is strong. I have a relationship with Him, not just a religion. I know He is there, walking with me, the same way He is walking with my husband in Iraq. And yet, when another military wife commented the other day that she thought I’ve probably grown closer to God during this deployment, I couldn’t really say yes. I was so determined to be strong this year that I allowed self-efficiency to overrun my dependency on Christ. There were many times that I tried to be my own power, my own fuel and my own spark. No wonder that pilot light kept going out. No wonder my engine stopped and sputtered so many times.

It’s easy to fall into this trap, isn’t it? After all, “God helps those who help themselves,” right? It’s something we say so often, we think it’s biblical. Unfortunately, that phrase is nowhere in the Bible. In fact, the opposite is. Jesus tells Paul “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:10). If you think about it, most of the men and women we read about in the Bible weren’t great because of what they did, it was what God did through them during their struggles and weakest moments that make them memorable, perhaps because we can identify with them so well.

But how does this connect to being a strong military wife? I know that I feel my most vulnerable, my weakest, when I am sitting in church and I know I’m sitting in God’s presence, with no distractions or other things to keep me busy. I’ve heard other military wives say this as well, and sometimes it even keeps them away from services because they don’t want to cry, they don’t want to be emotional. But maybe that’s the whole point. Being strong in my faith doesn’t mean I say I trust God but then do whatever I can to take care of myself with God standing by as a bystander or a spectator. Being strong in my faith means standing despite my weaknesses, knowing God is holding me up. Depending on God to hold me up. It means being strong enough to hand over those burdens to the One who can hold them, and it means trusting Him enough to know that He will.

I believe it is only in our weaknesses, our struggles and our hardships that God can do the most good. Not only in our lives, but in the lives of others. The more we can place our cares on God, the more He can be praised, because we see firsthand just who He is. He is God and He is my strength.

So in the words of Paul, as I await my husband’s return and do everything I can to help other military wives, I will “delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.

“For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

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