What Peter Had To Share

I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your siblings. - Luke 22:31-32

How might Peter have strengthened his siblings when he reentered community? He may have preached to them or prayed for them or encouraged them or mentored them. But perhaps he did something else that we see coming up often in scripture: what if he shared his weaknesses with them?

Have you ever noticed that when someone is vulnerable with you about their failings that you feel more comfortable being yourself, sharing your doubts or losses or mistakes? Maybe that’s what Peter did when returned to community. After all, the verse just before this one is that Satan was coming after Peter, so you gotta figure he faced some tough times while in that further orbit.

And consider just a couple other stories. When the woman at the well had her transformative interaction with Jesus (where her multiple failed marriages were exposed"), she returned to community and the scripture says, “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did” (John 4:39). It’s not hard to imagine what ‘everything I ever did’ included for this woman. And yet that vulnerability was the open door to the good news of Jesus breaking into that world.

And then there’s Paul, who faced some seriously bad crap when traveling through what is modern day Turkey. He wrote to his friends about how bad off his mental health became: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself” (2 Cor 1:8).

So how about you today - is there a person you might share vulnerably with like these three bible heroes did?