When Strength becomes Self-Reliance

“Okay, how did that go?” That’s how each physical therapy exercise ends. I usually answer, “I completed the exercise.”

“But how do you feel?” my therapist asks.

That question always stops me. Completing the task has never been my problem. Paying attention to how I’m actually doing is another story.

Like many Christian professionals, I’ve spent years pushing through discomfort so I could care for patients, solve problems, and meet expectations. I was trained to be dependable, reliable, and helpful, even if it meant ignoring my own limits. Self-reflection rarely made the priority list.

Physical therapy puts me in a weird place where I am constantly reassessing how I am personally feeling about something. It’s not my strength to stop and reflect. It’s my strength to keep going forward, keep digging in, and keep completing the project no matter what.

After having hip surgery last month, I realized how bad I am asking for help. I left a book I dropped on the floor for a week, not because I didn’t have anyone to call, but because I didn’t want to bother someone with something so trivial. I will walk in circles using every possible device, grabber, and option other than admitting I needed help.

It also happens in my career. Autonomous, determined, and initiative can quickly become disengaged, stubborn, and militant. There's a thin line between being independent and being isolated.

But at the end of the day, it’s a simple choice to do things a different way and to choose to live God’s way, and not follow our natural tendencies.

God didn’t build me with the intention of me demoting my own health to my job every time. Though being dependable is an important skill, it’s not better than being wise. We were created as finite beings, and because of that, have limits in terms of our abilities, our strength, and our endurance. Those realities are not meant to make us weak or worthless; rather, they are meant to remind us that we need more than just ourselves to keep going. We need relationships with other people, and we need relationships with God.

We weren’t created to run ourselves into the ground, determined to make everything work out entirely by our lonesome. We were created for better than that. We were created for life and life abundantly. We were created for the promise of something more. We were created for relationship, and as Jesus showed us, sometimes those relationships are with people we know will not perfectly support us forever (Judas).  

But we have to choose to change how we see ourselves. We’re not broken. Limited. Not worthless. Limited. Not hopeless. Limited. It’s a decision to walk in humility. We have great abilities but cannot do literally everything and were never supposed to.

As Christian Professionals, let’s stop doing it our way and running ourselves into the ground. Let’s stop measuring ourselves by productivity and performance. Admitting you can’t do it all and asking God to cover your imperfections is how God works true wonders in our lives. Thankfully, we don’t have to be perfect to be used by God for incredible things- we just have to learn to trust He is even more reliable than we are.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. 1 Corinthians 1:26-31