So What Was the Thorn?

It’s one of the mysteries of the Bible, attended by considerable speculation over the centuries. What was the “thorn” that plagued the Apostle Paul?

Paul mentions the thorn in 2 Corinthians 12, saying “a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure.” He says he pleased with the Lord three times for the thorn to be removed, and three times his prayer was denied with these words: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

It doesn’t appear to be a literal thorn that Paul was talking about. Some believe it was a human being, a persecutor who followed Paul around various cities (there were certainly no shortage of people willing to do that, including the group in Judea who vowed not to rest until they killed him). I tend to sympathize with this theory, having had what I consider more than a fair share of people over the years who stabbed, obstructed, plotted and undercut in the various jobs I’ve held.

Others believe it was some physical ailment like cataracts. Having endured a ruptured disk, I have sympathy for this argument, too. Physical ailments can be debilitating without impairing one’s mental faculties.

Bob Sorge in The Fire of Delayed Answers leans toward the physical ailment theory, but gets to the heart of what the thorn is really about: strength perfected in weakness. “God taught Paul that when he was weak and feeling inadequate for the challenges of the ministry,” Sorge writes, “God’s strength was able to be manifest through him.”

There’s considerable sense in what Sorge says. When we feel on top of the world, our spiritual effectiveness can be diminished, because we think we can do it all. When we are weak, we recognize our dependence, and God can make use of that dependence.

It’s a lesson learned through experience. And often relearned through more experience. And I can say that from experience(s).

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Confidence in His Ways,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Petr Kratichvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Strong and the Gray

I’m confident that at least 14 sociologists has studied this, many times over, and come to different conclusions from their colleagues, but when did the American obsession with youth actually begin? Was it something that’s been there all along?  Or is it of more recent vintage?

I don’t think it’s my imagination. Putting off the advance of age is a multi-billion dollar industry. Popular culture is aimed squarely at youth. Advertising focuses on and celebrates youth.

I don’t know when it started, but I suspect elements of our obsession with youth have always been embedded with the culture, relatively hidden or of minor note, until two things happened, both in the 20^th century: mass media, beginning with radio but changed forever with television, and then the Baby Boom.

I’m a Boomer myself, one of 86 million strong born between 1946 and 1964 (I’m not exactly sure why 1964 is the cut-off date, but it usually is). The Baby Boom came into this world like a human tsunami and changed everything about America: schools, culture, the workplace, social and moral values, entertainment, attitudes about trust and authority – there wasn’t much left untouched. And now we’re beginning to enter retirement, and we’re going to remake nursing homes, geriatric medicine and health, and the cemetery business.

An interesting observation: it was only with the Baby Boom that generations of Americans came to have names. In a sense, we even required that our parents’ generation be named (thank you, Tom Brokaw). And after us is Gen X, Gen Y, Millenials. Even our children were referred to as the Baby Boomlet.

Mass media, demographic changes, fear of aging and death – all of these have contributed with our obsession with youth. And then there’s also the reality that young people simply look more attractive than old people.

We associate youth with change, ideas, the willingness to try to new things, the refusal to accept the status quo, and even physical strength. We associate old people with gray hair, failing eyesight, and wheelchairs. We don’t associate older people with wisdom, unless they happen to be the guru of the month.

The Bible would say we have it backwards.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge cites Proverbs 20:29: “The glory of young men is their strength, and the splendor of old men is their gray head.” From an American cultural perspective, we get the part about youth and strength, but no one associates gray hair with splendor.

But the question is, where does the gray hair come from?

“Gray hair,” Sorge says, “represents experience, pain, one who has lived though life’s difficulties.” And gray hair sits atop those who were once young and strong.

He describes it as a life process – something that must happen if one is to attain wisdom. Over time, he says, God uses the experiences of life to help us understand that it’s not about us, it’s not about youth and beauty and strength. It’s about something else entirely.

Someone who has been through the experiences of life “has seen the faithfulness of God through great pressures, and he now has a testimony. It is not the strong but the gray who are fruitful” (emphasis added).

Our culture has it exactly backwards.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Brokenness,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

She Was Strong, This Woman

She was born in 1889 and died in 1985. Her life spanned horse-and-buggies and space shuttles. She was married at 15 to a man 10 years older than she was; she had five children and buried one.

She was strong, this woman.

I met her when she was 62, but I wouldn’t remember her until I was about three. My earliest memories of her were warm, embracing and musical. She played piano by ear; she never learned to read music. She sang with her church choir and she sang solos, including one she did for her 90th birthday.

For several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I spent a week each summer with her at her house in Shreveport. It was a magical place for me. My aunt and uncle lived across the street; my half-sister less than 10 minutes away; and there was a boy exactly my age who lived next door. And for each visit, I flew Delta Airlines by myself – a huge deal for an 8-year-old in 1960.

She drove an old black Ford, a sedan from the early 1940s. We’d tool around Shreveport – shopping, visiting downtown, stopping by the Louisiana State Museum at the state fairgrounds so I could see the cool dioramas. And it was inevitable that she would take a short cut through a poor part of town and equally inevitable that the Ford would break down somewhere along the way. She’d tell me to stay in the car, and she would go to the nearest house to ask to use the phone.

My grandfather had died when I was nine months old. She talked about him like he was still there in the house with us. She wanted me to know him, but I think she did it as much for herself as for me. They had met when he had stayed at the boarding house in Jena, Louisiana, owned by her mother. He was a land surveyor, working for the railroad. He married her in spite of her tobacco-chewing mother, and in spite of the rumors that her mother had killed a man.

When my grandmother was 5, her mother had put her to work in the cotton mills. She had no formal education, but she was fully literate and read her Bible every day. (I have this image in my head of her reading her Bible while her mother pinged the spittoon with used tobacco.) She taught a ladies Sunday School class for decades and I can remember her writing out her lesson on Friday and Saturday in a small, black two-ringed binder.

She was strong, this woman.

She endured the loss of her youngest, a little girl who got sick and didn’t get well. Two of her children (my father and his youngest sister) didn’t speak to each other for more than 40 years; how that must have grieved her. I can remember being in her living room one summer when the door opened and in walked the aunt I had never met, who looked like a younger version of my aunt across the street. We stared at each other. She was as shocked as I was – she didn’t expect to see what looked like her brother as a child standing in the living room.

My grandmother made all of her grandchildren feel like she loved them the most (although I knew I was really her favorite). She sent her only son off to the war in the Pacific. She stifled herself (mostly) when her son decided to raise her grandson in that den of iniquity called New Orleans, yet she loved to visit. I know she prayed for me from the day I was born until the day she died. Raised by a mother who was likely her polar opposite, she was strong in her faith and strong in her love for her Lord.

She was strong, this woman.


To read more posts on strength, visit the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Bridget Chumbley.