In those fun, ice-breaker / getting to know each other games, one of my favorites is “if you could spend a day with one person from history, who would it be? My answer never changes – there are lots who would compete fro second… Lincoln, Mandela, Mother Theresa, Peter… but top choice never changes, William Wilberforce. He is credited with a 26 year quest eventually successfully abolishing the slave trade in England. Wilberforce was a man who had two goals in life, to end the slave trade and to improve the human condition through the reformation of society. I first learned who he was through the movie Amazing Grace and have loved everything I have learned of him ever since. Two of my favorite quotes come from that movie. The first is the way Wilberforce encounters God. While history is clear that Wilberforce did radically encounter God as an adult — we of course don’t know that the movie quote is correct. But I love it anyway.

Wilberforce “It’s God. I have 10,000 engagements of state today, but I would prefer to spend the day out here getting a wet arse, studying dandelions and marveling at bloody spider webs.”

Butler “You’ve found God sir?”

Wilberforce “I think He found me. You have any idea how inconvenient that is? How idiotic it will sound? I have a political career glittering ahead of me, and in my heart I want spider webs.”

I don’t know why but I love that picture – it’s how I feel sometimes. I would rather marvel at God’s world around me than to go do the things laid before me. But like Wilberforce, I carry on. And thank God Wilberforce carried on in his political career as the good he fought hard for changed the world.

But this is really about the other favorite quote. Running together in the yard with his friend – Prime Minister William Pitt – Pitt says “Why is it you only feel the thorns in your feet when you stop running?” In the movie, Pitt is encouraging Wilberforce to keep running, but I always see something different in that quote.

We spend so much of our lives running. Running to make money, achieve, get the best friends, the most popularity, the most esteem. We quest at full steam to get everything we think we are supposed to have. Even in our faith, we often start running full speed ahead; serve everywhere we can, make sure everyone knows the scripture that is on our heart, make sure they can see how real and deep our faith is. Running, running, running.

I was running for a lot of years. Until one day I was stopped in my tracks. I found myself sitting in the corner of a concrete building with my bible, reading scripture and praying over the medical clinic that my short term mission team was holding in Ghana West Africa, on the small island of Ada without power or running water. I know what you are thinking, if I was running, how did I end up on a short term mission? But even that for me was part of my running, part of my quest to make sure that externally my faith was seen as full speed ahead – but God had a different plan for me in that trip. He stopped my running and helped me feel the thorns.

My first thorn was the small girl that halted me dead in my tracks. Sitting there, reading and praying, she quietly walked up to me and hopped onto my lap and just sat there with me. It was that moment I turned and looked into her eyes that the thorns became very real. I saw the little girl with so little in the world who so desperately wanted to be loved, held, that she sought it in a total stranger. It was the first time I began to really see the need that God holds dear. I had read the scriptures but never saw the need in them, just the obligation.

James 1:27 “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this, to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

Psalm 82:34 “Defend the week and the fatherless, uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

It was one of the quietest yet loudest moments in my life. The girl clung to me until we left the island, but I think I was clinging to her too; feeling the thorns, feeling a whole new awareness, awake-ness, a new purpose that was God’s purpose all along. I came home determined not to start running again – to be so caught up doing that I was never really seeing. Not to be so focused on what my life and faith looked like externally that I couldn’t hear the still small voice of God whispering in my ear.

When I came home, my eyes were different. I began to be aware of the thorns I had so easily ignored in my fast paced running. Thorns came as needs all around me – everyday needs. I became aware of friends who withdrew from their normal lives, only to reach out and find they were going through tough times and needed someone to just be there for them. I wondered how many thorns I hadn’t felt in the past – wondered about friends literally gone and wondered if there had been a time they just needed someone to be there for them. I became aware of opportunities in my everyday life to be a light; a word at work, a positive attitude to the people serving me at the grocery store or the pharmacy or the airport

I became aware of opportunities to draw closer to God; to praise, pray, to write His Word on my heart, and to live every day knowing and worshipping the God who created me and gave His only Son to atone for me. I found myself desiring to more internally know my God and his amazing grace that washed away the years I spent running from Him before I inconveniently yet majestically and permanently encountered Christ. And I become aware of those times I began losing focus. The thorns, they keep me awake, alert, and alive in God.

2 Corinthians 12:6-9 “Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of those surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of satan to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from 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 about my weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

Sometimes the thorns really are inconvenient. Sometimes I want to start running again so that I can stop feeling them. But I remember my days of running. I imagine I was the thorns in many other people’s feet. I know people who prayed for me, who stuck by me through the worst, who never let me disappear, who answered when I cried out and needed someone to just be there for me. So for all the thorns I have caused, I pray that I remain awake, ever mindful of the needs God is showing me. That I never start running so much that God’s plan and God’s love in my life be forgotten, unnoticed or ignored. Wilberforce’s thorn was the source of slavery, and he stuck with God for 26 years, never losing sight of the need. I pray that I always have that awareness of God’s working in me, and that I endure the long road without losing faith.

Because I once was lost, but now I am found. Was blind, but now I see.

And I want to be ever seeing, ever hearing, ever grateful for God’s amazing grace. So I will praise every thorn he blesses me to feel.