My Strength is My Weakness

While this is not what the cover of my
copy looks like, I think it is prettier, and
that my blog deserves the prettier picture.

Today we are discussing Chapter two of Book Two in Mere Christianity.  I know that I missed last week's discussion.   My husband was on vacation and we spent so much time holding hands, that I wasn't able to type.   I need both hands to type.   That's just the way my mind works.  I learned using all my fingers (but not my thumbs, except on the space bar) to type, so now more than twenty years later, I must use all my fingers to type a blog post.   I imagine this generation feels that way about their thumbs for texting, but I digress.   We are supposed to be discussing Mere Christianity, not our thumbs, so quit distracting me and let's get down to discussing!

Clive explains in the chapter why Dualism proves false.   The gist of it is that evil is a perversion of what is good.   Evil can not exist without the good, so therefore the good not only had to have come first, and foremost, and evil has to be rebellion to that good.   It makes sense to me.

Years ago I remember reading a series in a Chicago paper about how to conduct oneself in a job interview.   I didn't like everything I read.   Come to think of it, all these years later, I don't even remember everything I read, but what I do remember quite well is the suggestion by the author that when the interviewer asks what our greatest weakness is, we should play it off of whatever our greatest strength is.   For example, my greatest strength is that if I really want to fix something, I will stay with it until it is fixed.   The weakness is that this determination can turn to a sort of stubbornness where I stay with something that can not be fixed and waste time and energy.   I have since worked on this weakness by giving myself time limits and learning to put a thing aside for a bit and reassess later.   Often after putting it aside, a solution will come to my mind.   Other times, whatever I distracted myself with will loom more important at that point, and I will decide to let it go.   My point is that I can see how something good can be turned into something bad.   I'm sure mine isn't the only strength which can be turned into a weakness.  My guess would be that the only strength that can't be twisted like that is love for the Lord.

While my example is merely small potatoes, Clive manages to describe how Christianity's position on the devil being an entity created by God for something good who then went into rebellion makes more logical sense than a belief that evil and good are equal and opposite forces, with evil being entirely independent of the good (Dualism).  

Please visit my friend Sarah, where you will find her take on Chapters 1 and 2 from Book Two of Mere Christianity, and links to more discussions of Chapter 2.

What do you think?  Are our weaknesses related to our strengths?