In the Book of Mormon (Ether 12:27 to be exact), one of the promises Christ makes to those who follow Him is that, if they will come unto Him, He will show them their weakness.

This promise is extended as a gift; it follows on the heels (literally the previous verse) of a promise that His grace is sufficient to protect those who follow him.

To be clear, I love His promise to show us our weakness. I think it is one of the most beautiful indicators in scripture of what it means to have a relationship with the Savior…that he will know us and understand us completely. There will be no hidden agendas, no turning away from our weakness, but rather an embracing of it so that–and this is the key part–He can help us overcome it.

And there’s the rub. I’ve been pondering this promise a lot lately because I’m in one of those phases where my weaknesses are confronting me head on, and it isn’t fun. It’s actually quite painful.

Not to overshare, but to give you some insight into why I’ve been pondering this, last week I did something less than strictly honest. I had forgotten to complete a critical HR-related task at work. Instead of doing what I should have done in the first place, going to the head of HR and letting him know the situation and seeking his help in fixing it, I attempted to cover it up. My intentions were at least 50% good: my failure to complete the task had the potential to disadvantage one of the people I manage, and I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. But, I also wanted to keep my bosses from discovering that I had dropped the ball.

As you can probably guess, my efforts backfired on me, and I ended up having to confess what I had done anyway, only it ended up exploding into something much worse than it would have been had I taken the honest route in the first place. (Why do these cautionary tales about honesty always seem to point that out? Anyway…)

All the above would have been bad enough, but here’s the part that really breaks my heart: until everything blew up, it hadn’t really occurred to me that what I was doing was at its core dishonest. I was so intent on “fixing” the problem that I didn’t step back and consider whether my method of fixing it lacked integrity. I was so blind to my own behavior and motivations that I actually prayed for help with the steps I was taking to try to cover up the problem. (I can’t tell you how hard it was to make myself write that sentence and confess that part of it.)

Only after the fact did it occur to me how dangerously close I was to mocking God, and how egregiously inappropriate those prayers were. Even then, it still took some real soul-searching on my knees to bring my priorities into alignment, aka, being more concerned about what the Lord thought of me than what might happen after my employer discovered what I had done.

In the end, my employer was gracious and merciful. He decided to focus on the good 50% of my intentions rather than the selfish 50%. I know that the Lord has been merciful with me too. The person that’s having the hardest time being merciful with me is me. The harsh glare of the truth that we are not the people we like to believe we are is uncomfortable, to say the least.

And that’s why I’ve been pondering what it means that this promise of the Lord–to show us our weakness–is meant as a gift, not a warning.  Because honestly confronting your weaknesses–not just acknowledging you have them, but confronting them with sincere intent to change them–is an extremely painful process.

I know that on one level, the Lord sees this as a gift to us because we must see our weaknesses before we can overcome them, and we must overcome them if we are to reach our eternal potential. But I have come to believe there’s more to it than that. I don’t fully understand it, but in some sense the effect our weaknesses have on us is worse than just dragging us back from our eternal potential.  Our weaknesses make us vulnerable–duh!–and the Lord is trying to help us see where we can do something to become less vulnerable.

I was reminded of the chapters in the book of Alma when Captain Moroni is preparing the people for war, and he systematically goes through the country, strengthening all of the weak cities until the entire nation becomes as fortified as he can make it; in the midst of all that preparing for war, there is this beautiful description: “And there never was a happier time among all the people of Nephi.”  Making our weak places strong makes us happier now, in our current mortal state; it makes us less vulnerable to the pain that can come from so many different places in this world.  I believe that’s one of the key reasons that the Lord prefaces his promise to show us our weakness with the words, “my grace is sufficient for the meek, that [those who mock God] shall take no advantage of your weakness.”

These are connections I’ve never made before; maybe I’m just slow.  Making them doesn’t make the past two weeks any less excruciatingly awful.  But making them does give me hope that confronting the weakness in me that led me to make the choices I did–pride, fear of consequences, a desire to appear better than I am–might ensure that I don’t have to endure this type of situation again, at least not one of my own making.

So, yes, I love the gift that comes from allowing the Lord to show us our weakness.  It’s not an easy gift to accept, but I love it all the same.