Wandering Wanda: Strengths and Weaknesses

Fo some reason the title of this posts keeps kind of creeping into my life. Mostly through books and music. But good people too. :)

As a teacher, we are taught the importance of focusing on the strengths of our students. Or even through different leadership trainings many people, icluding myself, have been trained to focus in on our strengths. The logic being that some students do not have anybody in their life other than you that points out what they are good at. Or from the leadership perspective- why should we focus on our weakness and MAYBE improve it a little when we could focus in on or strength and do it in an AWESOME way?

So this sounds legit. I have touched on this topic many times as a teacher. I have had several students take the StrengthsFinder quiz and more recently we read about the Golden Buddha Habitude in a couple of my classes. It is about seeing the "gold" inside yourself and taking a personal inventory of your strengths. It is a great story about finding the value inside yourself and inside those around you. Read more about it here.

Now there are two forms of Habitudes one can get their hands on: the faith-based and the values-based books. At school we have the values-based books but I love to read the reflections used in the faith-based books. Here is something from it.

"Now, check out II Corinthians 5:17-18:

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come. All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”"

This tells us we are a new creation. Each one of us something brand-spanking-new and wonderfully unique. Completely new and glorious. Yes like the this song.

The lyrics, "What does that make me?" alway send me a very beautiful reminder and it makes me smile. Every single time. :)

Oh but wait!!! Did you check out the line in 2 Corinthians about reconciliation? He gave us the ministry of recon-silly-what?

Okay, so I confess (haha) I am reading another book in this group at church. It's called Rediscovering Catholicism. Yes, I do think it is a little ironic that I go from reading Catholicism for Dummies to Rediscovering Catholicism in about 12 months. Truth is, I am rediscovering Catholicism everyday! Which is waaaaaay awesome.

Anyway, there is this one part of the book that knows what is up and it is about the sacrament of Confession. It has put a spin on this whole strengths and weakness thing that actually makes a lot of sense to me. It tells us that our culture obsesses over strengths and tells us to focus solely on them. It wants productivity and effectiveness. Arguably both very good things. However, God has called us to be HOLY. We couldn't possibly do this without taking a look at our weaknesses and then working on them. Lucky us, we have the sacrament of reconciliation.

This book dissects Confession and it really shows us what a wonderful gift we have been given. If we take it to heart. I may not have a ton of experience in this area but I do know the value of frequent confession. I understand how much more "on-track" I am when I go more frequently and how little sins add up to big sins if I stray away for too long. Sure I have pondered the ideas of just confessing to God, or just doing the minimum. Then I think, "how many times did you confess your sins to God before you were actually Catholic?" Hmmmm, yeah about that. :) So you see, Confession is something to embrace. It brings us grace and self-knowledge and a clear conscience. All while working on our weaknesses.

Okay so to sum up this post, check out this song: