“To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable: to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength“ – Chriss Jami

Being vulnerable is not about always showing all of our glamour. It is about showing the parts of us that we keep locked up that are not so glamorous. I think we feel that if we show the parts of us that we keep locked up, we risk being judged and even rejected. We don’t think anybody else could understand us, so we stay behind our walls. We see vulnerability as a sign of weakness but it actually takes so much strength to show weakness.

” What happens when people open their hearts?…They get better.”
– Haruki Murakami

God asks us to pour our hearts out to him. When we do this he will expose our hearts, not to punish us but to heal us. True joy, comes from sacrificing ourselves for others, this requires vulnerability. We need to empty ourselves out to others while trusting God will fill us back up. We need to stop seeing others as our “competition” but more as our brothers and sisters of God who have the same needs and fears as we do. Don’t forget, God allowed Jesus to die on the cross for us. If he didn’t scorn the shame of the cross then we should not be ashamed of being vulnerable. Humility and vulnerability are so very hard to let show, but so necessary to have true JOY!

“What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful” – Brene Brown

We are vulnerable on all sides, in and out, up and down, past, present, and future. We fear vulnerability. It takes a great deal of living to discover that, actually, vulnerability comes to us more as friend than as enemy. Vulnerability may be the greatest strength we have. Vulnerability bonds us to one another and makes us a community in league with life. Because we need one another, we live looking for good in others, without which we ourselves can not survive, will not grow, can not become what we ourselves have the potential to be. [Change in our lives and in our communities cannot happen without this]. Vulnerability is the gift given to us to enable us to embed ourselves in the universe. We are born dependent and spend the rest of our lives coming to wholeness. It is a delicate and dangerous process, requiring and untold amount of support and an amazing degree of forgiveness as we stumble and grope our way from one new part of life to another. Vulnerability, in fact, is the one hallmark of life which, try as we might, we can not cure. Vulnerability, therefore is clearly part of the spiritual process, clearly part of the human endeavor. -Joan Chittister