Vulnerability and Connection

Wisdom from the speakers at camp

Hey everyone! I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but I work for a summer (and winter) bible camp up in the mountains. This is my fourth year as a staff member and therefore I am one of the senior staff. As such, I’ve had the privilege to hear many amazing speaks and learned many lessons over the past four years. Today I’d like to share one of these speaks that really resonated with me with you all.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Vulnerability and Connection

Vulnerability and connection. Two big words that circulate around the Christian community. But what do they mean, and how are they important for us in everyday life?

Vulnerability

Vulnerability is showing people all of yourself. According to Google, it’s “the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.” It’s opening yourself up to others, lowering your defenses, and trusting them with yourself. Vulnerability requires trust because you don’t know what the other person’s reaction will be to you. You could get hurt. That’s why being vulnerable is a huge sign of strength in a person.

Connection

Connection is your relationship with others. When you get to know a person, you connect and strengthen your relationship with them. Healthy relationships with others are so incredibly important to a healthy life. God made us to desire connections with Him and with others.

Here’s the main point I’m trying to make:

You cannot have deep connections without vulnerability

This idea actually originally comes from sociologist Brené Brown (who has an incredible TED talk - here's a link if you want to check it out). The way the speaker described it was really interesting to me. He drew a little drawing¹ on the back of my worship music to illustrate his point. For this illustration, relationship and connection are good. They are some of the highest parts of our life. Vulnerability is hard. It can be some of the lowest parts of our life, because being vulnerable also means you could or have gotten hurt.

As far down as we go into vulnerability is as far up as we can go in relationships.

This is the important part. In order to build deep and meaningful connections with people, you have to be vulnerable. You have to let them see who you truly are, and then trust that they will not abuse that knowledge. And, in turn, if they are someone worth having a connection with, they will show more of themselves to you.

Vulnerability and trust are key to how we form deep and meaningful connections with others.

This was a powerful lesson for me to hear, and I hope I did it justice while transcribing and describing my own interpretations.

Thank you guys for reading! If you found this post encouraging or otherwise helpful, feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments down below. As always, have a lovely day and we’ll see you in the next post!

-Abby

1. the profound drawing