personal development on Vulnerability

Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.

Vulnerability is not weakness. . . . It is the birthplace of creativity, innovation and change.

The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss—the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities...

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting started, vulnerability was not a high value. Things have changed. But with a higher value on transparency, authenticity, and vulnerability in the church,...

Society has taught us that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness—but it’s just the opposite. Vulnerability is the willingness to show up and be seen by others in the face of uncertain outcomes. Th...

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

If we want the advantages of love, then we must be willing to take the risks of love. And that requires vulnerability. Of course, we can refuse this path and trod another one devoid of openness. But t...

The mystery I wish to explore…is this: vulnerability as the condition, the enabling condition, for covenant relationship with God…Vulnerability, the capacity to be wounded—what does that mean for us w...

It’s a strange truth that I admire vulnerability in other people, but I don’t want to have to be vulnerable myself.

Above all is the centrality of love at the heart of vulnerable faith. Vulnerability will thrive only where love abounds—a love that is generous, gracious, patient, compassionate, humble, curious, joyf...

We can only experience the true beauty of vulnerability when we're courageous enough to crack open the fractures in our mask and allow the light to shine in.

This [brokenness] is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic fea...

It is my belief that we’re currently in the middle of a cultural overdose on authenticity—but without that necessary companion of vulnerability. I love that we’re all being so authentic and genuine. B...

In his excellent book, Strong & Weak , Andy Crouch discusses the unique phenomenon of nakedness, something, as he will argue, no other species really experiences. “Nakedness” has, for good reas...

C.S. Lewis indicated that if he wanted something easy and pain-free, he would have chosen a bottle of wine over Jesus. There is no question that biblical love leaves us more vulnerable. But this will ...

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; ...

In this excerpt from his book Faith in the Shadows, pastor and author Austin Fischer shares a surprising truth about the need to be vulnerable with our own faith if we are likely to have a positive im...

After C. S. Lewis lost his wife Joy to cancer, he wrote these words about the inextricable link between love, suffering, and vulnerability: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your...

Sleep reminds us of our helplessness. Asleep, we have nothing to commend us; we accomplish nothing to put on our resume. Because of this, sleep is a counter-formative practice that reminds us that our...

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control o...

Pastor and leader of the 24/7 Prayer movement Pete Greig reflects on the initial moments of realizing his wife, only in her late twenties, needed to have surgery to repair a orange-sized tumor from he...

When my eldest son, Drew, was a toddler, bedtime was a battleground in our house. I think he felt cheated by the prospect of sleep. He hated the thought of going to bed while the rest of the world con...

What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable.

“I’ve made myself vulnerable I’ve let myself care. I’ve opened my firmly closed heart. My safety is gone It’s no longer there My protection is falling apart. Nobody promised Our hearts would be safe O...

I have—found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in ma...

At some point, the two worlds of who we pretend to be and who we really are must collide. It is, however, better to let those two worlds collide rather than have everything snap under the tension of k...

The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they're still alive.

The weaknesses we see in the people of the Bible are the very weaknesses we ought to recognize in ourselves. Like Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit, we are vulnerable to temptation when we act on our o...

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other...