When your weakness becomes your strength

When our children were younger, one of our favorite family activities was playing games together. As they grew older, we added the competitive element — a trait my husband and I share and proudly passed on to our kids. We would laugh together and lovingly taunt each other, as our weaknesses and strengths would easily stand out, depending on the game we chose.

One night when our youngest daughter was about 10 years old, she chose the game Jenga — that simple wooden block tower game that has a remarkable way of revealing dexterity, strengths and weaknesses of everyone around the table.

If you’ve ever played Jenga with competitive family members, you know the drill. There’s the careful strategist, the impulsive risk-taker, the overconfident “I-got-this” uncle, and — more often than not — someone like me: the one whose hands shake just enough to turn a harmless game into a heart-pounding adventure.

About halfway into our match, competitive me reached for a block near the bottom — a piece I was convinced would slide right out and then make the next player’s move impossibly risky. Everyone around the table gasped as I daringly pulled the block, ready to win the game. My assumption was wrong, and my unsteady hands made the entire tower wobble violently, bringing every piece tumbling down.

Laughter filled the air as I hid my face behind my hands, dramatically screaming, “Nooooooo!”

My baby girl burst out laughing: “Mom,” she said, “your shaky hands make this so much more fun.”

I laughed with them, but her words lingered long after the pieces hit the table.

Isn’t it something how we see our weaknesses as liabilities, while others sometimes see them as the very thing that makes us human … relatable … even endearing?

For years, I viewed certain parts of my personality as faults I needed to conquer — traits I believed disqualified me from leadership or relationships. Like the tower in our game, I feared that one wrong move would expose the shaky places I tried so hard to hide.

One of those shaky places was my tendency to feel deeply. Too deeply, I thought. As a teenager, I cried easily. I absorbed other people’s sadness. I could walk into a room and feel tension like a gust of cold air. In my mind, people labeled that sensitivity as weakness, and I adopted the label as truth.

But over time — especially after I surrendered my life to Christ — I learned that God rarely wastes the parts of us we wish were different. Instead, he redeems them. He reshapes them. He repurposes them for his glory.

In Psalm 139, King David wrote that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” not selectively made. Not “made fearfully and wonderfully in our strengths.” He meant all of it. Even the parts that wobble like a Jenga tower.

God didn’t remove my sensitivity. He refined it. He taught me to anchor it in Scripture, to temper it with wisdom, and to allow his spirit to guide my emotions rather than be ruled by them. What once felt like a burden became one of the greatest gifts in my ministry: the ability to discern, to empathize, to see beneath the surface of a hurting heart.

This is the miracle of grace — that God can take the very traits we resist and turn them into instruments of his purpose.

Your quick tongue can become a weapon for truth and encouragement. Your stubbornness may mature into holy perseverance. Your restless mind can blossom into creativity and problem-solving. Your sensitivity may evolve into compassion that heals.

But the turning point is always the same: surrender.

When we place our weaknesses into God’s hands, he infuses them with divine strength. When we admit what we lack, he reveals what only he can supply.