At a clergy meeting recently, the sharing was on Acts 14:19. The stoning of Paul at Lystra.
The crowd that had wanted to worship him days before turns on him in an afternoon. They drag him out of the city. They stone him. They leave him for dead.
It is hard to read the passage without thinking of another stoning.
Years earlier, in another city, a young man named Saul had stood by and held the coats of the men who killed Stephen. He had approved of the killing. He had watched a man die for the same gospel he was now being stoned for preaching.
The text does not tell us what Paul thought as he lay outside Lystra. The dust on his face. The taste of blood. The voices of the crowd moving away. We are not told.
But I find it hard to imagine he did not remember Stephen.
Hard to imagine he did not feel, in some terrible and quiet way, the symmetry of it. The stones he had once stood near were now in the hands of another crowd, finding another body. The gospel he had once tried to silence was now the reason he could not stand up.
There are some things you cannot un-remember. I think Paul carried Stephen with him for the rest of his life.
Years later, writing to the Corinthians, Paul lists his sufferings. The beatings. The imprisonments. The shipwrecks. The hunger. The thirst. The sleepless nights. The daily pressure of his anxiety for the churches. He mentions, almost in passing, that he was stoned. He does not say where. He does not name Lystra.
He is telling them, in his own restrained way, that the cost has not been hidden from him.
What is striking is what he says immediately after.
He boasts about his weakness.
He talks about a thorn in his flesh — some affliction we do not know the nature of — that he pleaded with the Lord three times to remove.
The Lord did not remove it.
My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
The thorn stayed. The grace was enough.
There is a theology that has circulated in some Christian circles, and you may have absorbed it without meaning to. The theology says that faithful service produces a kind of supernatural protection. That if you are doing the Lord's work, the work itself will go well. That difficulty is a sign of being outside God's will rather than inside it.
Paul's life makes a different argument.
The stones did not stop falling because he was an apostle. The thorn did not get removed because he prayed harder. The shipwrecks and the hunger and the sleepless nights were not evidence that he had taken a wrong turn.
They were the shape of a life lived in the service of a crucified Lord.
The persecution, in Paul's telling, drew him closer rather than further. The stones became, in some strange theological sense, part of the call. Not the obstacle to ministry but a feature of it. Not the thing that disqualified him but the thing that formed him.
I do not say this to romanticise suffering. Paul does not romanticise it. He pleads for the thorn to be removed. He weeps. He admits to being so weighed down at one point that he despaired even of life.
The cost is real. The wound is real. The tears, when they come, are real.
But the wound is not the end of the story.
The grace is sufficient. The strength is made perfect, not despite the weakness, but precisely in it.
If you are in ministry — paid or unpaid, public or quiet, the long work of raising children, the care of an aging parent, the slow service in a church where you feel often unseen — and the stones have been falling, do not assume you have taken a wrong turn. Do not assume the difficulty is evidence that God has withdrawn.
The stones fell on Paul too.
The text says he stood up the next day and went on with the journey. The thorn stayed in his flesh until the end. He never got the answer he asked for.
He got something better. He got the presence of the one who knew, from the inside, what it was to be wounded for the sake of love.
The grace is sufficient.
It will be sufficient for you too.
