Or... Opportunities within Vulnerability
I know next to nothing about wine.
I know there's a clear kind, a pink kind, and a red kind,
that anything worth drinking probably costs more than $6 a bottle,
and that Napa Valley in California has something to do with it.
I can't list off brands or types,
I don't know what pairs with what food,
and I don't understand how a drink can be dry... (and at this point, I'm too embarrassed to ask).
Last year a friend and I decided that we would have wine nights where we would take turns buying a bottle of wine, and then we would share it. Well, I'm typically game when there's good drinks and good conversation to be had, so I agreed. Then it was my turn to choose and buy the wine and all of a sudden I wish I had been a little more reluctant to agree.
DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY DIFFERENT KINDS OF WINE THERE ARE????
I walked into the wine store, confronted by rows of bottles, all decorated differently and I was completely overwhelmed. I wondered between the rows feeling completely lost. I mustered up the courage that it takes to admit your own shortcomings, and I asked for help.
The guy working the counter lit up at my cluelessness. While he was showing me different options, we got to talking. He's studying culinary arts and he has a passion for wine. He said that so many people walk into the store, pick up a bottle, pay, and leave. He has this knowledge and this passion, but he isn't given the space or opportunity to use it, because no one asks.
When has your vulnerability created space for someone else, or; when have the gaps in your strengths created space for someone else's? I think that this speaks so strongly of the relational existence we human being have with each other. We all have strengths, some popular, some not so popular. On the other side of the coin, we all have weaknesses. Our weaknesses create spaces in the gaps between our strengths. We do ourselves no favors when we try to bridge these gaps with sub-par materials, when we would rather reach for what we barely have, instead of having the wisdom to reach beyond ourselves.
So your vulnerability, these gaps, these weaknesses, they create invitation for the strengths of others... if we let them.
To allow others' strengths to bridge our gaps, requires one large personal step, something easy to say, but difficult in practice.
We have to get over our weaknesses. More importantly, we have to get over the fact that we have weaknesses. This is something that I work on, on a daily basis. I want to be entirely self-sufficient, I think most of us do. Because of this, we see the existence of weakness as a flaw, or even worse, we think that others don't have weaknesses.