Chose is the verb to sit with. Not settled for. Not made do with. Chose, deliberately, when other options were available.
Corinth was a status city. Paul is writing to people who were keeping score on wisdom and strength and losing, and he tells them the scoring system is the thing God is dismantling.
He has just asked them to look around the room. By the usual measures, he says, few of them were impressive. Few had influence or education or the right family behind them. And before that he has been talking about the cross, a message that sounded absurd to the educated and weak to everyone else. The church in Corinth was itself the evidence for his point.
The foolish things to shame the wise. The weak things to shame the strong. It is not that God is indifferent to capability. It is that He keeps selecting in a direction that makes the usual explanations fail.
A sign up sheet goes round after the service. Read a lesson. Lead a group. Pray aloud at the front. You pass it along without writing anything, because you stammer, or never finished school, or your marriage did not survive. The reasons feel obvious, and they feel final.
Which means the part of your life you consider a disqualification may be the reason you are useful. The gap in your education. The thing you are bad at. The story you would rather not tell.
Nobody looks at that and concludes you did it yourself. That is the point of the arrangement. The weakness does not have to be fixed first. It is part of what is being used.
Offer the weak thing this week instead of the strong one. Pick one place where you would normally stay quiet because of it, and say yes there. Put your name on the sheet.
