itsawonderfilledlife

Got a temptation?

A constant frustration?

A pain?

A flaw?

Got a thorn?

“Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, 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.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
2 Corinthians 12:7-10

Paul understood struggles with regards to his flesh, his humanness. 

A number of weeks back I re-watched the movie A Beautiful Mind, and was captivated by how true the following lines are in dealing with real life struggles:

“I still see things that are not here. I just choose not to acknowledge them. Like a diet of the mind, I just choose not to indulge certain appetites; like my appetite for patterns; perhaps my appetite to imagine and to dream.”

“I’ve gotten used to ignoring them and I think, as a result, they’ve kind of given up on me. I think that’s what it’s like with all our dreams and our nightmares, Martin, we’ve got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive.”

Both quotes from the movie are lines by the Russell Crowe real-life mathematician, John Nash, who struggled with the effects of life with Paranoid Schizophrenia.

Mr. Nash knows what it is to live with real life struggles.

Though I do not know if the lines, credited to John Nash, speak his own words, I do believe that they speak to us all, in the areas of our life that are our tempters, torturers or trials.

We all live with a thorn (or two, or …). We all know what it is to struggle, to agonize.

What Mr. Nash reminds us is that “we’ve got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive.”

What Paul reminds us is that “when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Help us, today, to remember to not feed the thorn in our lives, and help us to rely on God’s strength to thrive despite the torment.