Lent is progressing.  Already some of you are feeling discouraged, like you’re not living up to what you intended to do for Lent. You know, it’s really okay to feel weak and helpless, to feel that you’re never making any progress.  In fact, that may be the best thing that ever happens to you.  Fr. Dajzer writes: “Your weakness, inability, and helplessness will become a crack through which the grace of faith will squeeze into your heart.”  Lent, as I’ve written before, is not really about getting “stronger”. Well, it is about getting stronger, but not in the world’s sense of the word.  Our strength is in our weakness.  “The might of God needs the weakness of man.”  Consider this from Fr. Dajzer:

God, getting closer to man, weakens him.  He does just the opposite of what we would expect.

You may believe that it is you who are approaching Him and that under those conditions you should become increasingly stronger and increasingly able to get along by yourself.  However, it is He who is coming closer to you and His approach makes you weaker, physically, mentally or spiritually.  He does this in order to dwell in you with His might, since it is your weakness that makes room for His might.  When you are weak, you cannot trust in yourself, you cannot believe in yourself and then the opportunity comes for you to turn to Him and to desire to rely on Him.  So often you shield yourself against this greatest grace, the grace of weakness, but St. Paul has already written: “for power is made perfect in weakness.  I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me . . . for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12.9-10).