The Thorn She Asked Him Three Times About

The wind on that headland at seven in the evening is the kind that makes you shout at somebody four feet away, and Bethan comes up here on purpose when she wants to be somewhere loud.

She is forty-nine. She has been walking this coast since she moved back.

And she has asked three times.

Not three prayers. She wants to be precise about this because the precision is the whole thing. She has muttered about it ten thousand times, in cars and at sinks and lying awake, and none of those are what she means.

Three times she has set herself to ask.

The first was at thirty-two, on a weekend away, when she went out at six in the morning and asked God, deliberately and at length and with her whole self, to take it off her.

The second was at thirty-eight, in a much worse year, and that one she remembers as almost violent.

The third was two years ago. Forty-seven. And that one was the quietest of the three and she meant it more than either of the others, and she had a date and a place and she had thought about how to say it.

And nothing.

Not a no. That is what she would want you to understand. A no she could have worked with, and she has said so out loud to one person. What she got was nothing at all, three times, and the third one was two years ago and she has not asked since.

And in those two years a reading has settled on her, the way a reading does, and it goes like this: the silence is the answer, and the answer is about me.

He would have answered somebody else. Or: this is the one thing that disqualifies me. Or, in the small hours, the plainest version: He has decided about me, and this is how He has communicated it.

She stands on the headland with her hood up and both hands on it and the grass going flat all round her.

And she has never once, in seventeen years, noticed that Paul asked three times too.

You have a silence like that. Yours might be about something else entirely and I am not going to guess. But you know how many times you have genuinely asked, and you know what you have started reading into what came back.

He asked three times, and an answer came

Second Corinthians 12 is where Paul talks about the thing he could not get rid of, and the first thing to notice is that he never says what it was.

Not once. Two thousand years of guessing and the text simply does not say, and I have come to think that is deliberate kindness, because it means nobody can hold theirs up against his and decide whose was worse.

For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:8-9

Thrice. Three times, exactly like you, and he counted them, exactly like you, which tells you they were the deliberate kind and not the muttering kind.

And then five words that undo the reading you have been carrying for two years.

And he said unto me.

An answer came.

You are dealing with a God who answers a third asking, and Scripture records what He said. That is the written word and not my hope for you in a high wind, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an exchange in an apostle's private prayer life and lays it on a headland at seven in the evening.

Now, the answer was not removal. I am not going to blur that, because you would spot it and because the passage does not blur it either. The thing stayed. Paul says so.

But an answer came, and it came to the third asking, and it was a sentence, and it was about sufficiency rather than about him.

My grace is sufficient for thee

Take the sentence itself, because it is doing something specific.

My grace is sufficient for thee.

It is present tense. Not: my grace will be sufficient once you have adjusted to this. Is sufficient, now, in the current arrangement, with the thing still there.

And it is addressed. For thee. Not a general principle about grace being adequate in the abstract. For you, in this, at this size, with this history.

Then the reason clause: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Made perfect there means brought to its full expression, completed, arriving at what it is for.

Which does not mean the weakness is good, and Paul does not say it is. It means the strength is not waiting for the weakness to clear before it does anything.

This is yours, and the sufficiency is stated in the present tense with the thing still in place, and it is already settled. Second Corinthians 12 says is sufficient in exactly that tense, and the same Spirit Paul says works in him mightily is the one making it a present fact in a woman on a headland with both hands on her hood.

Now let me guard this, because there is a cruel version of this passage and it gets preached.

I am not telling you to stop asking. Paul stopped after three; that is his account of his own life and it is not a rule issued to you, and there is no verse that limits anybody to three requests about anything.

And I am not telling you the silence was good for you or that you should be grateful for the two years. You should not have to be grateful for that and I am not going to ask you to be.

And this above all: nothing in that passage reads the presence of the thing as a verdict on the person. Paul was the apostle to the nations. He was writing Scripture. If the presence of an unremoved thing were a comment on a person's standing, that chapter could not exist.