Why This Fox Reporter Says You Should ‘Boast in Your Weaknesses’
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Fox News journalist Shannon Bream is reflecting on Paul’s example to share why it’s so important to “boast in your weaknesses.”
“I know that all of you come here with different things today…” Bream said at the Liberty University convocation in August. “Here at Liberty I learned a lot of lessons, but as I sat there in those seats over there, I thought about what I would say to myself, to that young woman who sat there in her teens and early 20s trying to get everything right…I wanted to feel like everything was perfect, that I looked perfect.”
She continued to try to appear perfect in her marriage when she developed an extremely painful chronic eye disease. She only told her husband about it, and no one else knew about her struggle.
“I was living in a nightmare. I was desperate for sleep, but I knew that when I did, there was a good chance I’d wake up in pain,” Bream said previously. “It pushed me to my limits, emotionally and physically, because I had no answers and there seemed to be no hope.”
For two years, “I worked through every specialist I could find for this eye problem that I was having, and I called an office for this guy who was supposed to be the best cornea specialist in Washington, DC, and I said, ‘I know he’s not taking new patients, [but] do you ever have a cancellation? Do you ever have an opening?’ and I had prayed, ‘Lord send me someone to walk me through this,’ and the lady said… ‘Can you hold on for a second?’ She came back on and she said, ‘We just had a cancellation for tomorrow; can you come?’ and I said, ‘Yes, thank you, Lord. Get me through one more 24-hour period of this and let me get to this doctor.'”
When Bream told the physician her symptoms, he quickly told her he knew what illness she had, much to her amazement.
“I’m thinking I’ve spent two years in what often felt like hell on Earth in this chronic pain, and he is the answer to my prayer, and I told him that, and he looked at me sort of weird, but I thought, well maybe this is a witnessing opportunity. There is purpose in our pain,” she explained. “I believe that God is too good to let us be in pain without purpose.”
But the last thing the doctor told her before she left her appointment was that there was no cure for her condition.
“I thought, ‘Lord, how could you lead me this far to this man who I believe is an answer of prayer to help me and then to find that there’s no cure for this nightmare that I’m living in?’ and I left that office as quickly as I could,” she recalled. “I had to get back to work, and I’m sobbing and sobbing and sobbing in the car, thinking, ‘This cannot be the answer. I just want to drive this car off a bridge. I can’t live like this anymore,’ and as I’m sobbing, I heard the Lord say to me, not audibly but in my spirit, He said to me, ‘I will be with you.’ Not ‘I’m going to heal you. I’m going to take this away. Here’s your miracle but I will be with you’ and that has been enough.”
Fox News anchor Shannon Bream will host a new special on Fox Nation that dives into the true stories from the Bible called WOMEN OF THE BIBLE SPEAK…
Eventually, Bream had a surgery that greatly lessened her pain and made her condition “manageable.” She says her eyes are “95 percent better” now.
“I couldn’t be more grateful now. When I get out of bed in the morning, I literally say a prayer. The first thing I do is thank God that I got through the night,” she told PEOPLE.
However, “I live with this thorn. This awareness that I am flawed and human and I need my Savior. I need him to get me through every day. Through every issue. Through every problem, personal and professional, but I also found too that when I started to share with people the truth about how difficult that period was and how much I hurt and what a dark place I got to it began to be a source of healing not only for me but for other people who will then share vulnerably whether they’re in or out of the body of Christ when they can see that we’re willing to admit we struggle and we suffer.”
“And what an example we have from Paul that he is so willing to really just spill it all out there about his own struggles and the fact that he tells us God gave him this thorn to keep him from being boastful in himself, but there is something good about boasting in your weaknesses,” Bream said. “…So boast about your weakness because there is something to be made about making your personal faith more personal to other people. [By] bearing each other’s burdens, I became a much more empathetic person.”
