2 Corinthians 12:10 · World English Bible
Therefore I take pleasure in weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in persecutions, and in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then am I strong.
To take pleasure in hardship sounds absurd to the mind, which brands every difficulty as an enemy. But there is a way of meeting reproach, loss, and distress without the inner resistance that turns pain into suffering.
From the Ego v. Being reading below.
The same verse, read by 2 traditions.
EGO & BEING
To take pleasure in hardship sounds absurd to the mind, which brands every difficulty as an enemy. But there is a way of meeting reproach, loss, and distress without the inner resistance that turns pain into suffering. You accept this moment fully, and the struggle against it dissolves.
When I am weak, then am I strong, points to what happens when the ego stops defending itself. As long as you fight your circumstances, they drain you. The moment you accept them, the same situation can no longer feed the false self or disturb the stillness underneath. This strength is not force. It is the peace that hardship can no longer reach.
SUFISM
Balā': Testing Balā' is hardship God allows into a life, and the Prophet said the prophets are tested hardest of all. Anyone stacking up their troubles usually reads the stack as proof of being dropped. From the other direction, the same stack marks a life God has not let go of.
Riḍā: Contentment with what comes Riḍā, peace with what God sends, goes further than patience, which holds on while still wishing things were otherwise. Someone in long trouble spends most of their strength arguing with the trouble, and the arguing costs more than the trouble does. When that argument ends, the hardship stays and the person is no longer split in half by it.
Faqr: Poverty before God Faqr is owning nothing of your own; the Quran tells people plainly that they are the poor and God alone is rich. Listing your weaknesses out loud normally feels like confessing failure. Named as poverty, the same list is plain accounting, and the shame drains out of it.
Tawakkul: Leaning your weight on God Tawakkul is the heart resting its weight on one caretaker, which al-Ghazali ties to knowing that God is the one who acts. Leaning like that only starts once a person has run out of their own footing. The strain of holding yourself upright is what most people call strength, and it quietly ends when something else takes the weight.
No power and no strength except by God: strength is borrowed People say this line under their breath in moments of exhaustion, and the Prophet called it a treasure of Paradise. It marks every bit of force a person has as arriving from somewhere outside them. Admitting they have none of their own does not leave them empty, since the supply was never coming from them in the first place.
Ego v. Being lens
How much of what tires me out is the situation, and how much is my fight with it?
The obstacle in your path becomes the way forward once you stop treating it as an insult. What harms you is your judgment about it, not the thing itself.
Water does not fight the rock. It goes around, and keeps going, and that is why nothing stops it.
The teacher said: no mud, no lotus. The difficulty is not the obstacle to the flowering, it is the ground of it.
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Ego v. Being
Sufism