It was my first in-person physical therapy session since covid-19 had forced us to use video calls for our work on my years-old hip/hamstring injury. My physical therapist, Matt, said “it seems like a good time to reevaluate you.”
He asked me to do a bunch of movements, exercises, and stretches. He was right there with me the whole time, watching each movement closely, testing each muscle in all directions, and recording what he found. We’d been working together for several months already at this point, but it had been a few weeks since he’d really seen me, so he wasn’t sure what he would find when he did all this testing. But he was pleased with what he found. He repeatedly exclaimed at how strong I was in a particular movement and how much progress I’d made since his first evaluation. He was universally positive, even when we got to testing my left adductor muscles.
My left side was the side that was weak when I started the process, the side that trauma, injury, and neglect had left weak and struggling to adapt and compensate and still do all I was asking it to do. We’d worked on strengthening it from almost every angle--glutes, hamstrings, abductors, etc. Some of it I didn’t fully understand, but I worked at it anyway, hoping these efforts would help end the chronic pain I was in and allow me to exercise in the ways I wanted to. So when Matt tested the strength of the muscles on the inside of that left thigh and found them to be noticeably weaker than the same muscles on the right, he was positive about it.
In the context of all the strength and progress he was finding during the re-evaluation, this adductor weakness wasn’t a big deal. The overall picture was still very good. But it was a useful discovery. This weakness could account for some of the pain and difficulty I was still experiencing, but more importantly, addressing this weakness would help me be more stable and balanced as a whole and less likely to get into pain and injury in the future.
After the evaluation, Matt showed me a couple of carefully-chosen exercises to target and strengthen this area of weakness. He took me through them patiently, showing me how I could do them on my own at home without him there to set me up.
I walked out of Matt’s office that day and got in my car, about to drive home. Before I could get going, I had this powerful feeling of joy come over me. Look at all you’ve done! Look how far you’ve come! Did you hear what Matt said about how strong you are? It wasn’t just that Matt said it. The re-evaluation had shown me my strength in a way I couldn’t argue with. It was plain to see. I quickly texted my husband to share this little bit of good news, this moment of measurement that showed my growth.
It’s long been my habit to hide any form of weakness I possess from anybody else. Weakness is, I thought, a very bad thing, a thing to be hidden, got rid of, and be ashamed of in the meantime. I also usually take the blame for my weakness: it’s a show of how bad I am in character, and if I were being who I’m supposed to be, I wouldn’t have these weak areas. At all. I should have known, and I should have fixed it already. And certainly spending time in my areas of weakness would not be desirable. I would like to spend as little time as possible sharing them with others and dwelling on them. Unless I need to beat myself up about something, and then, of course, I pull out the whole list.
So going to physical therapy is a big lesson in turning this upside down. From the minute you walk in, every effort of that physical therapist is calculated to reveal to you the exact nature of your weakness. All of it. It would do no good at all to try to hide your weakness. A good physical therapist like Matt would find it anyway. And if you aren’t willing to find your weakness and work on it, then why are you even here at physical therapy? In physical therapy, you hope to bring the weakness to light, understand what you’ve been doing to compensate for it, and strengthen and retrain your body to move better, which allows you to feel better.
I wasn’t very far into physical therapy before I noticed the parallels between this process and an important scripture that we talk about a lot. It’s found in Ether 12. I love this moment in the story. Moroni is glorying in the marvelous teachings of the prophet Ether. Then Moroni gets a little carried away, almost, rejoicing in the power of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and recounting many miracles and changes that such faith has brought about. It’s a beautiful little discourse, but Moroni goes right from it into his feelings about his weakness in writing, about his fear that some of his audience will mock him because of it.
Then he gets this response from the Lord that I’m so glad he shares in his record. It’s a response that comforts, clarifies, and corrects:
Fools mock, but they shall mourn; and my grace is sufficient for the meek, that they shall take no advantage of your weakness;
And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.
You see it right? Just like physical therapy, I go to him because I am ready to work on what’s holding me back. I’m ready to stop hiding it and being ashamed of it and worrying what others think of it. But here’s the thing. He doesn’t see my weakness as something to be ashamed of. He sees it as something that will bring me to Him. And what does he ask me to do? Spend time there. Spend energy there. Let Him help me with it. Because He knows exactly what to do to help me grow through it. He knows what experiences I need and how to encourage me and set me up to do what He’s asking me to do.
So with this counsel from the Lord, Moroni wrote what he was asked to write. He was clearly pretty hesitant to do so, as he says himself at times. He didn’t feel it was his strength, but the Savior was able to make his weakness become strong.
I’ve also often thought, “I already know all about my weakness, thanks very much. I don’t need to have them pointed out to me by someone who is supposed to be my loving Savior. Why would I want that?”
But physical therapy taught me a bit about that. When I first went to see Matt, I really didn’t know where my weakness lay. I knew some things I wanted to do but couldn’t, and I knew I was in pain, but I didn’t know why. We come to him; he shows us our weakness. I’m not sure if Moroni really knew his weakness (he thought it was weakness in writing, but maybe it was really his fear of what others would think), but regardless, most of us don’t really know what’s holding us back. We don’t really know exactly how we need to be strengthened in order to move forward. We need someone whose specialty it is to make weak things become strong to tell us. Or maybe we know a bit about our weakness, but we don’t know the best way to become strong. We don’t know just the set of things we need to practice to make progress toward our goals.
In physical therapy, I didn’t know where I was weak, and it wasn’t necessarily my fault that I was weak in the ways I was. I didn’t need to be ashamed of my weakness because I didn’t even know about it until he showed me! How could I have fixed it or worked on it on my own when I didn’t know exactly what was wrong and what I needed? I had to be humble enough to ask for help. I had to be willing to listen to what he wanted to teach me. I needed to be willing to try to work on it. Only then could I learn exactly what I needed to learn.
Sometimes Matt showed me something new that I needed to do to get better. Sometimes it looked impossible for me to do. I thought, there’s no way I can do that. Or, I’m going to make a fool of myself. Or, I just don’t want to do it right now. It’s too hard. But he was there with me, patiently making his expectations clear and not letting me give up without trying. When I really couldn’t do the exercises he gave me, he would adjust them so that I could still make progress. He didn’t let me give up on myself. He didn’t let me not try. He kept expecting me to push through what was challenging and he kept encouraging me and answering my questions along the way.
Over time, I came to trust Matt. I began to see some change and some progress. I began to see that he wouldn’t laugh at my failures or let me fall. He would catch me and right me and tell me to do it again until I could do it without his steadying hand.
It is with all these parallels in mind that I began to see it as very safe and even desirable to go to the Lord and say, “Show me my weakness. I know thy grace is sufficient.” And as I asked that question in prayer, I began to see miracles. He showed me my weakness, and it was not anything like what I expected it to be. It was not a dark moment of guilt; it was a loving and joy-filled experience. I felt elation, much greater than after my physical therapy re-evaluation. Shame I had carried for years went away almost overnight. The fear that I couldn’t make progress was replaced by patience: trust that He would not let me fall, but he would stand with me and steady me, all while expecting me to do the work He gave me which was specially designed to strengthen me. I was now under the care of the Master Healer, the Great Physician. He would take care of me, and I felt to rejoice. I echo Moroni’s final words on this matter, “And now, I would commend you to seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written, that the grace of God the Father, and also the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, which beareth record of them, may be and abide in you forever.”
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