Three Days Blind, Led by the Hand

He came into Damascus holding somebody’s hand.

At midday he’d been on the road toward the city with letters from the high priest, authority to arrest anyone there who belonged to the Way and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. Then a light, a voice, and when he got up off the ground and opened his eyes, he saw nothing. The men with him took him by the hand and led him in.

They left him in a house on a street called Straight, the house of a man named Judas. He sat there three days. He didn’t see. He didn’t eat. He didn’t drink.

When God sent somebody to find him, the directions were an address and one line about what he was doing there: behold, he is praying.

There’s a plan people make after something breaks, and it sounds responsible. Get well first. Be useful after. Once the body mends, or the habit’s handled, or enough time has passed, there’ll be a better version to offer.

The man on Straight Street never got to make that plan. He was put to work in the condition he was in.

It matters who he’d been the week before.

He was trained by the best teacher in Jerusalem. He says so himself, later, in front of a crowd: brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, taught strictly in the law. A Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee. Fluent in the Scriptures the way almost nobody alive was. If the movement had been hiring for its top position, he had the résumé.

And he’d spent the résumé hunting them. He was there when they stoned Stephen. He held the coats. Then he went house to house, the text says, dragging off men and women and putting them in prison. The trip to Damascus was more of the same. He wasn’t a skeptic. He was an enemy, and a good one.

That’s who was sitting blind in the house of Judas.

God sent a man named Ananias to go lay hands on him, and Ananias, sensibly, objected. Lord, I have heard from many about this man.

The answer wasn’t he’s better now. It was this: He is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.

The commissioning and the suffering are in the same sentence. There’s no gap between them. Nothing about once he’s healed, once he’s proven himself, once the old reputation fades. Here’s the job, here’s what it will cost, and both start now.

Ananias went. He put his hands on the man who’d come to arrest people like him and called him Brother Saul. Something like scales fell from his eyes. Within days he was in the synagogues saying the opposite of what he’d come to town to say.

Nobody waited for him to be well.

The rest of his life doesn’t look like a clean robe and a steady wind.

He made tents. That was how he ate. In Corinth he moved in with Aquila and Priscilla because they had the same trade, and he worked with his hands through the week and argued in the synagogue on the Sabbath. He reminds one church that he worked night and day so he wouldn’t be a burden to anyone. A tradesman with a ministry, or a minister with a trade, and the distinction might not have meant much to him.

He had a temper. He and Barnabas, the man who’d vouched for him when nobody else would, fought so sharply over whether to take young Mark on the next trip that they split the team and went separate ways. Luke, who liked Paul, still wrote it down. Years later, from prison, Paul writes get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me. So it healed. It took a long time.

He mouthed off in court. Standing before the council, somebody ordered him struck on the mouth, and he snapped back, God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall. Then somebody told him he’d just insulted the high priest, and he walked it back on the spot.

He kept a list, once, of what the work had cost. Five times thirty-nine lashes. Three times beaten with rods. Stoned once. Shipwrecked three times, a night and a day in the open sea. Danger from rivers, from robbers, from his own people, from Gentiles, in the city, in the wilderness, at sea, from false brothers. Sleepless nights, hunger, cold. And at the bottom, the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. He put the anxiety on the same list as the shipwrecks.

Near the end, writing to a younger man, he called himself the foremost of sinners. Present tense. Decades into the work, churches across three provinces that exist because of him, and he’s still the chief.

Then the thorn.

He never says what it was. People have guessed for two thousand years: his eyes, his speech, a chronic illness, a person who wouldn’t leave him alone. He calls it a thorn in the flesh and a messenger of Satan, given to keep him from getting conceited.

He asked God to take it away. Three times, he says, and he’s specific about the count, the way people are about something they’ve been keeping track of.

The answer was no, and the wording of the no is the reason this chapter exists. My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

Not after the weakness. In it. And Paul, who was not a man given to accepting things, took the arrangement as it stood. When I am weak, then I am strong.

A good share of what he left behind came from confinement. Tradition counts Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the short letter to Philemon about a runaway slave, and the second letter to Timothy as prison letters. In that last one he asks for the cloak he left at Troas, and the books, and says that at his first hearing no one stood with him. In Philippians he says, almost cheerfully, that his imprisonment has turned out to advance the gospel, because the whole imperial guard now knows why he’s there.

Rejoice in the Lord always. The peace of God, which passes all understanding. Both of those came from a man under guard, the thorn still in, calling himself the chief of sinners.

The thorn stays, and the work goes on anyway. The strength shows up inside the weakness, not on the far side of it. There was never a fixed version of Paul waiting to do the work better. There was this one.

Where this meets your week

Straight Street has a lot of addresses.

When the caregiving ends and the body goes. For years somebody needed you every day, and you held up because you had to. Then the need ended, and within months the back gave out, or the sleep, or the heart. The plan was to be useful again once you were healthy. Paul’s most useful years were lived with something in his flesh he’d begged three times to lose. Book the appointment you’ve been putting off, and while you wait for it, do one useful thing anyway. Drive somebody. Fix something. The healing and the usefulness don’t have to come in order.

The glass that got earlier. Two in the evening became two in the afternoon, then three. The deal you made was to deal with it once things settled, and things have settled. That’s a thorn, and it’s the kind that grows in the dark. Tell one person the true number this week, a doctor or a friend, and let them help decide what’s next. Paul put the pressure he carried on the same list as the shipwrecks. He didn’t hide it, and it didn’t disqualify him.

The worry with no job to do. After a job ends, especially one that ended without your say, the worry that used to run the calendar has nothing left to attach to. It shows up at three in the morning anyway. Paul named his daily pressure of anxiety in plain words, in a letter other people would read. Name yours the same way, on paper. Then give it something small and real to work on, one person’s problem that isn’t yours, and see whether it settles for the afternoon.

The partner you split with. A business partner, a co-worker, a sibling, a friend from church. It got sharp, you went different directions, and the story has been told one way for years. The text never shows Paul and Barnabas working together again. But Paul asked for Mark by name near the end. There’s often a Mark in these stories, the person caught in the middle. Call that one first. It’s the easier call, and it may open the other door.

What Ananias heard is the order this runs in: the job and the cost in the same sentence, starting now.

So name the thorn. One line, plainly, on paper: the thing you’ve been telling yourself has to be resolved before you can be of use. Ask to have it taken away if you want to, three times or thirty. Then do this week’s work with it still in. One useful thing, for one person, done by the version of you that exists today, not fixed and not waiting to be.