Content with what God allows

Accepting what God allows to afflict us is part of our formation. It also helps to keep us humble. Paul was tempted by his own holiness. We don’t need to have Pauline-style intimacy with God to be tempted with self-importance regarding our goodness and worthiness. We can get there all by ourselves, staring into a mirror and falling in love with the person we see. 

It’s no less a sin than loathing ourselves for how awful we are. It’s not about us. Instead, we have Christ to experience, the Holy Spirit to be with us, and the Father to fill us with faith. This is how we can be content with what God allows. 

Image by Karolina Grabowska

Content with what God allows

By John Pearring


https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/061921.cfm
II Corinthians 12:1-10
Matthew 6:24-34


As aphorisms go, the proverb-like adage from St. Paul is worth chewing on for a bit.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)

St. Paul is famously known for reporting this quote as an answer to prayer. Three times he requested that God remove an affliction Paul called a, “thorn in the flesh.” Twice his plea goes unanswered, and then he hears that God’s grace is sufficient and his weakness has a purpose.

Other than pointedly painful we know nothing about Paul’s aggravating disease, nor even if it was a disease. He describes only that his adversity is a beating from an angel under Satan’s command. His misery falls into the bruising category (beating) and is wickedly whacked from an unwarranted place (an angel of Satan). 

If we consider our partnership and collaboration with Paul the same can be said for us. God allows that we suffer specifically that, “power is made perfect in weakness.”

Disabilities and adversity are common. In our gathering of aging men every Wednesday the list of aggravations suffered by each one of us are probably no less painful than Paul’s. We suffer from heart disease, cancers, diabetes, failed joints, cataracts, annoying deafness, and even missing limbs. Goodness gracious. That’s a list from less than 30 people. Not one of us has escaped a measurable weakening of some function or another. 

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

That’s not the whole story, of course. The miraculous healings and emotional repairs have been more numerous than the miseries. In numerical measurements miracles far outnumber the afflictions. Even as we’ve mourned more than a dozen of our members who’ve passed on to the heavens cited in St. Paul’s visions, we’ve also counted each one of these men as a saintly intercessor who avidly joins in our prayers for family and friends. It’s even something we’ve urged each man to do. “When you get to heaven, remember us!” 

Newer members regularly fill in the gaps left from our dead friends, but there are no real holes that need filling. Those men are still urging us on, prodding us in ways old men dream of friend’s love. 

Therein lies the power, I suppose, that St. Paul reckons God fosters in our weaknesses. We are spiritually bound together, “in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me,” as St. Paul describes.

The next step in that awareness of misery with a purpose is more difficult, of course.

“Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor 12:10)

Such a maturity comes from a saintly place few of us can attest to. Paul’s three pleas of removing his misery properly describes the human condition. Some of us have plead far more often than three times. It’s the danger of misery to dwell upon the dagnab bother and tedious repetition from satanic beatings as punishment rather than opportunity for seeing God’s grace. These maladies are not punishments from the view of the Christ follower.

It seems a mistake to say we’re not being punished since we’ve done enough evil things, surely, to warrant punishment. That’s not God’s operating mode, however. Allowing misery has another function—to make us strong. It’s tough to wrap your head around that, isn’t it?

Because we’re practiced in seeing blessings as only repairs and reconstructions. Blessing are primarily good things in our practice of God’s love. Affliction is unfamiliar territory in conversations about holiness. Can we really see strength in weakness? 

“For when I am weak, then I am strong,” doesn’t roll off the tongue right away. We don’t easily see our constraints for the sake of Christ. Rather we get caught up trying to figure out what we’ve done wrong.

I’m not saying we don’t deserve punishment. I got a speeding ticket once that was a mistake, but I took it on the chin willingly because so many other times I had been speeding and got away with it. Concentrating on “consequences” isn’t what God wants us to see in the nature of our afflictions, though. He’s looking for our awareness of him molding us, forming us into disciples of witness. 

Paul's affliction helped protect him from temptations, he wrote describing his pleas to God. “To keep me from being too elated.”

Elation, here, isn’t about joy and glorious intimacy with God. Paul speaks about our misunderstanding of grace as pumped up blessings, rewards for good behavior. He talks about being elated with himself, rather than with God.

Mixed into this discussion, and rarely referred to, is Paul’s experiences with God in visions and revelations as a catalyst for being puffed up and self-centered. Paul’s intimacy with God in dreams and visions, and outright conversations with the person of Jesus, should not be considered unavailable to us. In truth, we’ve probably all had miraculous visions, but we missed their significance. If we did recognize them we might well have nervously set them aside as too weird to approach. If we were to embrace them, though, it’s possible we’d compare ourselves to others as a better Christ follower, more holy, and eventually more loved by God.

We don’t need to have Pauline-style intimacy with God, though, to be over-inflated regarding our goodness and worthiness to God. We can get there all by ourselves, staring into a mirror and falling in love with the person we see. It’s no less a sin than loathing ourselves for how awful we are. It’s not about us.

Instead, we have Christ to experience, the Holy Spirit to be with us, and the Father to fill us with faith. This is how we can be content with what God allows. 

“Although if I should wish to boast, I would not be foolish, for I would be telling the truth. But I refrain, so that no one may think more of me than what he sees in me or hears from me …” (2 Cor 12:6)

Knowing God allows afflictions to sharpen us, strengthen us, and draw us near to him and to the people of God around us. This is what grace miraculously does. It’s not our effort that brings this about, but being content and witnessing as God urges. More often, intimacy with God happens without affliction. With affliction, however, we’ve entered another plane. A witness of being content with what God allows.

Using Format