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We all want to live a life of flourishing. In “Strong and Weak,” Andy Crouch defines a flourishing life with a simple 2×2 grid depicting the relationship between authority and vulnerability. All authority with no vulnerability, you have exploiting. No authority with all vulnerability, you’re in the suffering camp. You’re withdrawing if you’re moving away from authority and vulnerability, and you can only flourish if you have authority coupled with vulnerability. Jesus was the perfect example of flourishing and came “that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
I found myself highlighting chunks of this sleight book, and while it dealt with a weightier topic, it was a fast-paced read. Crouch addresses each quadrant individually, and the chapter on withdrawing especially struck me. He writes about an event on a college campus where he spoke on the ideas presented in “Strong and Weak.” At the end of the night, he invited students forward for a time of personal prayer with volunteers. Overwhelmingly, the volunteers reported that students most struggled with “withdrawing.” One student who asked for prayer “confided that in each of his four closest relationships, he was experiencing overwhelming temptation to minimize risk, avoid real enga
gement and abandon them.”
Crouch attributes this specifically upper, middle-class, phenomenon to the “safety generation,” and says, “Amidst safety the world has never before known, the greatest spiritual struggle many of us face is to be willing to take off our bubble wrap.”
I agree with Crouch’s suggestion that perhaps the first step for many of us “swaddled in affluence and intoxicated by technology,” is into the natural world. “Choose to go to places – the ocean, the mountains, or a broad, wide field – where you will feel small rather than grand.”
Ultimately, though, withdrawing keeps us from the true adventure God has for us – an adventure that involves both pleasure and pain. “We will only discover them if someone unwraps us and calls us forth. And the great glad news of the gospel is that someone has.”
Throughout the book, Crouch deals with relevant cultural topics like racial injustice and abortion, arguing however subtly, that children born with physical or mental disabilities are able to flourish – and help others to flourish.
“Strong and Weak” inspired me to take meaningful risks in my relationships, to pursue deeper leadership through vulnerability, to follow Jesus as I look to bring others from a life of withdraw or suffering into flourishing, and to, in the end, rest in the grace that I was rescued in the greatest of rescue stories. My story is not about me – it’s about my rescuer.
