Weaknesses and Strengths

Last Friday, I was performing the song Doesn't Mean Anything by Alicia Keys with a band from my worship band class. I was playing keyboard. The song is fairly basic musically. It goes from an E to a C#m to an A, back to an E for most of the song, mixing it up a little bit in the bridge with a few different chords. There's a fairly basic piano part that I play at the beginning and a few parts in the middle. After we performed it, a few people came up to critique us and give us some things to work on. They talked to us about dynamics and how we can really build the song up to the climax just after the bridge, stuff like that. Then the guy who was doing sound came up and talked to me for a minute. He said I was playing all the right things for the song, but there were several times when it seemed like I would accidentally hit a wrong note, as if I was hitting two notes next to each other rather than cleanly hitting the correct note. I wasn't sure exactly where he was talking about, but as we played through the song once more, I watched for it and sure enough, my thumb would periodically hit an F at the same time I was hitting an E. I realized that the reason I was doing this is because my fingers weren't as curved as they should be when I was playing. This is something I've always struggled with for some reason, I play with my fingers very flat. After the song, I went up to Luke, the sound guy, and thanked him for bringing that to my attention so that I could work on that. He went on to tell me I should spend time every day practicing keeping my fingers curved while playing. I can play scales or chords and focus on keeping them curved so that this weakness would eventually become my strength.

As I was thinking about this later, I realized that this should be how we approach our weaknesses in life. Often I think Christians have defeatist attitudes. They accept their weaknesses as "just the way they are." I know I've had this attitude about myself a lot in the past. As followers of Christ, we should be walking in victory. When God calls things in our lives to our attention, we need to allow Him to change us, so that those weaknesses we have in our life eventually become our strength. It's not about striving on our own though, but allowing Jesus to change us and having faith that He can and will change our weaknesses into strengths so that we can help others with the same thing we struggled with. Hope this encourages you!