Sufficient grace

My daily quiet time for Bible reading and prayer has been sporatic for the last year and a half.

After Uncle Dan died I lived for almost a year with my sister J and her family, where I had a built-in time quiet time. Being a guest in a house with three other busy people (sometimes four, when my nephew B was home from college), I made it a habit to get up and in and out of the bathroom before anyone else got out of bed. This gave me an hour or so to be back in my room before leaving for work. Every day for all those months I faithfully read the Bible and prayed.

Once I was able to move into my own apartment, the built-in quiet time disappeared. I still spent time in the word and praying, just not as often and not as faithfully as I would like.

So this morning I opened up my copy of Our Daily Bread to January 20th. Today's devotional topic is from 2 Corinthians. Paul makes a prayer request to which God says no. He asks three times for a "thorn of the flesh" to be removed from him. We don't know what his thorn was - an infirmity, a disease or a weakness - but Paul saw it as a hinderance. God saw it differently.

My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.

I have asked God many times to remove a thorn from my flesh...it's a weakness, a dependency on something other than Him that for most of my life I have used to fill the hole in my heart - the hole which God wants to be the One to fill. The end result of my weakness is the most socially-unacceptable condition of our time. It is the first thing anybody I meet knows about me, even before a word is spoken between us.

I weigh over 300 pounds.

More tomorrow...