Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Allison. Today's scripture offers us a wiser way of being human as we step into the day.

It's Friday, and today's passage offers a countercultural idea. Your fragility isn't proof you're failing. It may be the very place God is meeting you with strength.

Today's reading comes from 2 Corinthians 4, 7 through 10.

But we have these treasures in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

We are hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair.

Persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the

death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.

Now it's important to note that Paul is speaking about literal persecution here,

a very real external threat to his life. Most of us aren't facing exactly what Paul faced in the

same way, and still these words carry spiritual and psychological truth for all of us, because

many of us know what it is to feel pressed, perplexed, and stretched beyond what we can hold on our own.

I want to start by naming something many of us feel, but rarely say out loud.

Most of us don't mind being strong.

We don't mind being capable.

We don't mind being the one others lean on.

What we mind, what we quietly fear is being seen as breakable. Because fragility can

feel like exposure, like weakness, like a loss of control, like proof that you're not spiritual

enough or disciplined enough or emotionally strong enough. And if you've spent much of your life

being the steady one, being responsible, being competent, being the one

who holds it together, fragility can almost feel intolerable. It can feel like the one thing you're not

allowed to have. So when scripture uses an image like jars of clay, it can land in two very different

ways. For some of you, it might land as comfort. Oh, I'm not the only one who feels fragile. And for

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