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 and stone him and leave him for dead.
Years earlier, in another city, a young man named Saul had stood and held the coats of the men who killed Stephen. "Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul" (Acts 7:58). Luke adds, flatly, that "Saul approved of their killing him" (Acts 8:1). He had watched a man die for the gospel he was now being stoned for preaching.
Luke 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 off toward the gate. But I find it hard to imagine he did not remember Stephen, or feel in some terrible quiet way the symmetry of it. The stones he had once stood beside were now in the hands of another crowd, finding another body. The gospel he had tried to silence was the reason he could not stand up. I think he carried Stephen with him for the rest of his life.
Years later, writing to the Corinthians, Paul lists what the work has cost him. The beatings, the imprisonments, the shipwrecks, the hunger, the sleepless nights, the daily pressure of his anxiety for the churches (2 Corinthians 11:24-28). He mentions almost in passing that he was pelted with stones. He does not say where. He never names Lystra.
Then he boasts about his weakness. He describes a thorn in his flesh, some affliction whose nature we do not know, that he pleaded with the Lord three times to remove (2 Corinthians 12:7-8). The Lord did not remove it. "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).
The thorn stayed. The grace was enough.
A theology circulates in some Christian circles, and you may have absorbed it without meaning to. It 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 means you are outside God's will rather than inside it.
Paul's life argues the other way. The stones kept falling on an apostle. The thorn stayed through harder praying. The shipwrecks and the hunger and the sleepless nights were the shape of a life lived in the service of a crucified Lord. In Paul's own telling the persecution drew him closer, and the stones became part of the call rather than the obstacle to it.
He does not romanticise any of it. He pleads for the thorn to be taken away. He weeps. He admits to being so weighed down in Asia that "we despaired of life itself" (2 Corinthians 1:8). The cost is real and the wound is real, and the wound is not the end of the story.
If you are in ministry, paid or unpaid, whether that means a pulpit or the care of an aging parent or a job that drains you or the slow service in a church where nobody notices when you are missing, and the stones have been falling, the falling is not evidence that you took a wrong turn.
The stones fell on Paul too. Luke says the disciples gathered round him, and he got up and walked back into the city that had just tried to kill him (Acts 14:20). He left for Derbe the following morning. The thorn stayed in his flesh until the end, and he never got the answer he asked for.
He got the presence of one who had also been wounded for the sake of love.
The grace is sufficient. It will be sufficient for you too.
