But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
2 Corinthians 12:9 (NIV)
The Third Time He Asked
The tremor took the fine work first. He had trained on inlay and spent most of his working life at it, and by the end he couldn’t hold a scribe line across four inches. Nothing came back. He tried the weighted gloves and the medication and a brace a man in Ohio makes by hand, and he still can’t do the work.
He sharpens now. People bring him chisels and plane irons and he puts an edge on them they can’t put on themselves, and it isn’t the work he wanted, and he’ll tell you so if you ask him. Some of the ones who knew him both ways say he got easier to be around. His sister says the opposite and has her reasons. Nobody can settle it, including him.
Paul had a thorn in his flesh, he calls it, a messenger of Satan to torment him. He pleaded three times with the Lord to take it away, and what came back was an answer he hadn’t asked for. But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
The thorn stayed, and Paul turned all the way around on it. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. He wants the weakness where it is now, and he says why. Christ’s power comes down to rest on him.
Nothing in that sentence says the thorn turned useful. Paul never tells us it made him better at his work or easier to live with, and he doesn’t claim it was worth it. Plenty of people are made worse by what stays, and he doesn’t promise a softening or describe one. He says something came down and rested on him, in the place where he was losing.
And he is at the far end of something. Glad, boasting, all the more gladly. He doesn’t pretend the near end of it looks like that.
I have a short list of things I’ve asked God to take, and I am not glad about any of them yet.
He hands the chisel back with a strip of cardboard folded over the edge. Somebody asks whether he misses it. He says every day, and then he asks after the man’s mother.
A Prayer to Remember
I asked you to take something out of my life, and when nothing came back I quit asking, Lord. I’ve been quiet about it since. Speak to me about it, in whatever words you choose, and I’ll hear them however they come.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
