The Power of Vulnerability

Most of life, I think, is a dance between our desire to be loved and accepted, on the one hand, and a desire to protect ourselves from being rejected and hurt on the other. The trouble is, these two desires are most often at odds. That is, the only way you can believe you are really loved and accepted is if you allow yourself to be really known. That is, you stop pretending to be someone else; otherwise, you can never know for sure if they love you or the person you’re pretending to be. But to allow yourself to be known is a risk. The person to whom you reveal yourself may not like you, or may reject you, or may run away from you. It’s happened to each of us and we spend a lot of time and energy making sure it won’t happen again.

And there’s the great conundrum of human life – in order to receive what we most deeply want, we need to be vulnerable to what we most deeply fear. No one gets at this conundrum, or the importance of embracing it, better than Dr. Brene Brown. I shared a video yesterday of her interpretation of the parable of the vineyard workers. Today I want to share with you a TEDTalk she gave two years ago in which she recounts her own journey into the land of vulnerability and, as she names it, the art and practice of “whole-hearted living.”

Given these bask-to-back videos, I suppose I could have named this Brene Brown week, but these two really came together by coincidence. I had planned on taking the Wednesdays in Easter (I know, I know, most people do something during the Wednesdays in Lent, but I want to revel in resurrection, too!) to share seven of my favorite TEDTalks and why I found them so provocative and life-enriching. In the case of his video, I love Dr. Brown’s candor, insight, and the way she models what she’s talking about. I show this video to several of my classes – both on preaching and theology – every semester and so have seen it more than a dozen times. And I have to say I get something more out of it each time.

The first time I showed it, one of the students present said almost immediately after it finished, “How do we form communities like that?” That is, communities that invite us to give up the false protection of certainty, blame, denial and accusation to support each other in embracing vulnerability, courage, and whole-hearted living. It’s a great question, and after you watch this video I’d love if you’d share you sense of how we can better support each other in living lives of courage and grace. In the meantime, enjoy the Talk and feel free to share it with those you love – it’s a message we can all bear to hear.

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