Thorns

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." (2 Corinthians 12:7-9)

    I have loved this scripture for a very long time. However, I always just read & meditated on the end of it, "my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." I had never really read what lead up to those words, but today, for the first time, I understood a little more from it. As much as we despise the "thorns" in our lives, whatever they may be, they are an unbelievably huge blessing from God. Our thorns are the very things that remind us just how weak we are. If we could conquer these thorns on our own, then yes, we would have the right to take all the credit and keep all the glory for ourselves. A thorn will stay in your life as long as you allow it. For many, that can be a lifetime. And yes, we are perfectly capable of functioning with thorns. Think about it, if you actually had a thorn stuck to your arm that you could not remove, I'm sure the universe would not stop. You would still have to get up, go to work, and continue on with life. Life would be possible, but there would always be that little sting of pain. For many, that is exactly how life looks. We get up every morning and put at least a half smile on our faces. We function, but we function with a little bit of pain in our lives. Those thorns don't have to stay there; God wants to help prune those pesky thorns out of our lives. Of course, we all want our thorns removed, and I'm sure you're thinking, well duh! The thing is, it's not easy. If it were easy, we would have all already lined up before God with a handful of our thorns, He would have wiped them away and we'd all be perfect people with perfect lives. But it's not easy. It's hard. Truly presenting our thorns to God is hard. It means we leave our egos at the door. Handing our thorns over to God, means we surrender; we surrender our whole being to the creator of the universe. Now like I said, the world does not stop turning because we have a few pesky thorns in our lives;  so what are we to do as we strive with our God to remove those thorns? In the book Restless (yes I wholeheartedly recommend this book!), Jennie Allen shares a quote from the movie Amazing Grace: "why is it you only feel the thorns in your feet when you stop running?" She goes on to say, "when we run for God and for people, we forget for just a moment about ourselves, and it feels amazing. Nothing makes a soul sicker than too much time given to itself." So run; run despite the pesky thorns in your life. Run even when you don't know what direction to go; run even when it looks more like a crawl. Just get moving. No matter what your personal thorns are, start running, the pain of your thorns isn't so bad once you start running. & when you do stop to catch your breath, I am sure you'll be pleased with how far you've come.