When Weak Is the Strong Part

There was a man named Paul, and he wrote letters.

He wrote to people far away. People he loved. People who were sometimes frightened, the way you are sometimes frightened in the dark. And in one of those letters he leaned close and told them a secret about himself. A tender secret. The kind you only tell someone you trust.

Paul had something that hurt.

He never told us exactly what it was. A pain, maybe. A trouble that came back, and back, and back. He called it a thorn. Have you ever had a splinter you couldn't pull out? It pricks every time you forget about it. Paul's thorn was like that, only deeper, in a place his fingers couldn't reach.

So Paul did the thing he knew to do. He prayed.

He asked God, "Please, take it away." The thorn stayed.

He asked again. "Please." The thorn stayed.

He asked a third time, with his whole heart, the way you ask for the thing you want most in all the world. "Please, God. Take this away from me."

And the thorn stayed.

Oh, that is a hard thing. To pray and pray, and still carry the thing you hate. Maybe there is something you have asked God for, and asked, and it is still there when you wake up in the morning. That is a real ache. Paul felt it too.

God did not leave him without an answer. God spoke to Paul very gently, like a hand resting on a tired shoulder. "My grace is enough for you," he said. "My power works best in your weakness."

What a strange and lovely thing to say. In the world Paul knew, strong people stood at the very top. The mighty won. The weak got pushed to the back and forgotten.

But God's kingdom is turned the other way round. In God's family the small are held closest. The tired are carried. And the very place where you feel weakest, the place you would hide if you could, is the place God loves to fill up with himself.

Long before, Paul had written to these same friends about a plain clay cup with a treasure shining inside it. This is that wonderful thing again. The crack is where the light comes out.

So Paul stopped being ashamed of his thorn. He almost began to love it. "When I am weak," he said, "then I am strong. Because then it isn't me holding me up. It's him."

And Paul learned that from Jesus.

Because Jesus did the strongest thing that has ever been done, and he did it from the weakest place there is, hanging on a cross, where everyone thought he had lost everything. That was the very moment he won.

So bring him your thorn. It is not too small for him to notice, or too big for him to hold. Go on aching if you must, and go on asking. He is there in the weak place with you, being strong where you are not, and one day you will look back at that very place and find it was where he stood closest of all.