On Sunday morning I arrived late to church, handing out excuses like the seventeen hour drive home from North Carolina making my head spin and my morning slow. I crept to the front row, where I usually sit, and listened to a favorite guest speaker deliver. He titled his message "Christ: The Sabbath Rest" and by the end of the sermon my head was in my hands, tears tracking a path down the length of my brown boots.

I don't cry in public. I shed single tears, when I am praying or when others are praying, when something heartfelt or particularly emotional happens, when I leave people I love or when they leave me, but I don't cry. Whether it is because I disdain crying or because I am jealous of those who do it freely, I don't know. My pillow would tell a different story, or perhaps my car. They know better.

But sometimes my weakness overwhelms me. Sometimes my humanity fences me in, like a cowering pup, and I am left shell-shocked at who I have become. Or maybe who I've always been.

There is a verse in Philippians, chapter 2, that teases me and repulses me simultaneously:

So then, my beloved,
just as you have always obeyed...
work out your salvation
with fear and trembling.

I balk at fear and loathe trembling. I am afraid of being humiliated and tremble at the thought of being made weak. But I am weak. It is this that I am finding recently.

Paul wasn't so concerned about the fear or the trembling, though, I don't think, as the prerequisite to salvation worked over. The preceding verses tell of a Man who obeyed threefold, humbled Himself, became obedient to death, even death on a cross. They tell of a Savior who took every step of obedience to the next level.

I am no fool: I stop when it hurts the first time.

So here we are told to work out our salvation, the great work that was finished on the cross, the ongoing process of sanctification, with fear and with trembling. We are told to keep on keeping on. Because it will hurt. Because it is work. It will be take the utmost of our strength. It will deplete us. It will drive us back to the cross again and again and again.

But fear and trembling are not the mark of the strong, they are the mark of the weak. The one who knows he is weak and still obeys the upward call.