2 Phrases Easier Said than Done

There are two phrases that I have come to believe are very important in the Christian life, but my recent dealings with them have been difficult. The first one is found in 2 Corinthians 12:7-9. Paul is talking here and he says:

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave 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 of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

Paul talks about this thorn in the flesh that bothers him constantly - a thing we could easily imagine that causes him either physical or emotional pain, or both. Some have speculated that it was blindness, or other physical things. Some thought it was something more so that he was just self-conscious about, that made him feel sick to his stomach with nervousness when in public. It’s not terribly important exactly what it is - there was something constantly nagging him, causing trouble for him personally, and he asks God to take it away. God’s response: My grace is enough to get you through it. I want you to feel that weakness so that MY power can shine through. Essentially - if you were good looking, a dynamic speaker, and were intelligent enough to reason with anyone - why would you need to rely on God? You got this on your own, right? God desires us to rely on him, and this was his way of reminding Paul to do just that. Don’t focus on yourself, focus on me. My grace is enough to get you through.

I recently wrote a post called “My Wound.” In that post, I talked about what I perceive as my thorn in the flesh. It’s the one thing that has constantly harassed me in my life and caused me emotional pain, even to the point of feeling physically ill oftentimes. This isn’t necessarily scientific, but I’m somewhat hyper-sensitive to relationships. This has been a boon many times in that I quickly pick up on very subtle ques in conversation and social settings. But the downside to that is that when something goes wrong (possibly) in one of my relationships, my mind goes off the deep end making all kinds of assumptions, and all those subtle things quickly rise up into a crazy theory of the worst case scenario. It’s rather difficult to deal with at times.

The second phrase comes from Andy Stanley. I recently heard him give a talk on relationships. He basically said, when you are fearing the worst, believe the best. That’s probably not his exact quote, but essentially, when you don’t know what’s going on with another person, and your mind is tempted to race off into wild theories (like mine does), the best thing for you to do is to believe the best about them. If your wife says something to you that hurts your feelings, don’t assume she did it to hurt your feelings, believe that she did it unintentionally. There’s a lot to be said here for basing these beliefs on past history as well. If your wife has a good history of not always intentionally trying to hurt your feelings, you can safely assume she wasn’t doing it this time. The problem is, if you assume the worst, you might begin to act on that assumption, and find out that you were wrong, and screw things up majorly in the relationship.

The full meaning of these two phrases came together for me this week. I have a really good friend, one of my best friends in fact. He moved away a while back and has been busier with work, so I haven’t been able to stay in touch with him as well lately. He was coming back to the area this week, texted me and asked about having lunch. I was excited and we planned to meet Tuesday. Tuesday morning when I got to work, I remembered that I had a 3 hour meeting scheduled over lunch that I absolutely couldn’t miss. I called him and apologized and he said, no problem, let’s do Wednesday instead (the last day he would be here before returning home). So, Wednesday came, and I turned down other opportunities to eat with coworkers, telling them I was going out to lunch with a friend. I was ready at noon, but he didn’t call. I was still waiting at 1pm, getting hungry, and still no call. I texted him at 1:20pm to ask if we were still doing lunch. No response. I knew he was a busy guy, so I spotted him till 2pm just in case. Still nothing. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t responded whatsoever at this point. At 2:30, I heated up some raman noodles in the microwave and ate them gloomily.

That evening my mind did its thing and began racing. I began to really have a hard time with the whole thing. I began to wonder if I had done something wrong and he was upset. Why would he have been so interested in having lunch one day and blow me off the next? It didn’t make sense. Maybe all this time my trying to get a hold of him and not getting through wasn’t just him being busy at work - maybe he was distancing himself from me. I began assuming the worst. Maybe he was in a car accident and couldn’t call. Or maybe he just doesn’t like me anymore and could care less. The more I thought about it, the more nausea I had in my stomach, and every hour that passed without knowing was agonizing. The next day I got up the nerve to call his phone, two rings and then voicemail. Did he just hit the end button and send me to voicemail?? I’m not leaving a message. He’ll see that I called and call back, if he wants to. He didn’t call back. By Thursday evening I was trying to move on, but I was quite depressed about the whole thing.

Now, something you have to know about me is that this has happened regularly to me in the past: I have someone I consider a great friend and then one day, out of the blue, they go off the radar and stop returning my calls/emails and I never know why. And my hyper-sensitivity to relational things only makes my assumptions more crack-pot and my desire to know and resolve it more agonizing. THIS is my thorn in the flesh - and it hurts every time and I have asked God to explain it or remove it, and I heard him saying yet again on Friday morning, “My grace is sufficient for you.” And my response, “I’m not sure…”

So, this is a very long story to get to the main point of the post, but those two phrases, My grace is sufficient for you, and Assume the best about people, are very important I believe. I should fall back on God’s grace to get me through tough times, and when people let me down, I should assume the best about them UNTIL I know the truth. But let me tell you - those two are so much easier said than done. It was very difficult to practice those this week. But practice I did, and I’m grateful for it.

I kept repeating them to myself over and over, Assume the best (and I’d try to assume good things, that he doesn’t have a history of doing this, and that it wouldn’t make sense some of the things I was assuming), and rely on God’s grace to get me through (but that’s not exactly an easy 3 step thing to do - I tried hard to rely on His grace, but I just wasn’t sure if I was doing it or not since I was still hurting inside). But the important thing was that I did not ACT without God’s grace and I did not act based on assuming the worst.

Friday morning, I told myself I’d call one last time, leave a message assuming the best, and then let it go after that. Within the hour, I got a call from him, he was very upbeat as if nothing had happened. As we talked, I found out that his phone’s network got an upgrade, but his phone didn’t get it, so all day Wednesday text messages sent to and from him did not get to their intended recipients. He had texted me at 11am Wed. to say he would be too busy to meet and that he apologized. I never got it. Thursday when he was back home, he took his phone to the store for the day to get fixed (why he didn’t call on TH). And he did call as soon as he was able to on Friday to resolve the whole thing.

So, even though more of my thoughts revolved around assuming the worst, I tried hard to remember that believing the best is a better thing to do, and I should act based on that, not the negative. Had I done the converse, I could have caused serious miscommunication and even damage to our relationship. And, though I couldn’t be sure I necessarily FELT God’s grace, I am sure that focusing on it and striving for it kept me from feeling totally lost without it.

It was a difficult thing to do - much harder than I had thought when I had heard those two phrases in passing. Oh, just assume the best and rely on God’s grace, as easy as tying your shoe. But in reality, it is much harder than that. And you fight with yourself to hold on to those in the moment. I wanted to share this, because I think a lot of things in the Christian life are like this. We hear it in passing and think, yeah, I’ll do that when the time comes, and it will make things easier. But they’re not necessarily easy - it takes effort to do those things because we are of two natures, spirit and flesh, and they fight each other. It was an inner struggle, but I feel like I had a victory through this - and it came through following those two phrases.

Not everything we do that is beneficial to us, is easy to do. But we should still do them, even fighting to make ourselves do them - because in the end we will not only survive the struggle, we will learn from it. I now know that that works, and it will make me that much stronger for the next time around.