Who likes being weak?

I had hoped I would be close to "normal" today but I am not.  I awoke feeling weak and shaky.  I had to go the oncology center to get 2 liters of fluid pumped into me with other meds.  I feel better but nowhere near "normal."  I stopped by the YMCA to drop off some paper work on my way home and was reminded of how I was there just before my surgery on February 10 to exercise on the elliptical trainer and lift weights.  I was strong then, but not now.  Dear friends came to rake my lawn today.  I couldn't help.

So I am drawn this evening back to 2 Corinthians 12:7-10.  This little paragraph follows Paul's enigmatic description of his experience of receiving direct revelation from God about the gospel and God's purposes in the world.  He only recounts this episode because the Corinthians are in danger of following after false teachers who claim that Paul is not a true apostle.  So right after reporting the experience he had while receiving God's revelation he says this:

"So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.  Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave 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 of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.  For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong."

I've referred to this passage before to show that God sends suffering to his people and he uses Satan to do it.  God sent the thorn in the flesh, even though it is also a "messenger from Satan" because the purpose of the thorn is to "keep Paul from becoming conceited".  Only God would want Paul to be humble and thus God is the ultimate cause of the thorn for Paul's good, even while Satan causes the thorn to destroy Paul.  I've also pointed out that the thorn most certainly was a chronic physical ailment as the term translated "weakness" is usually translated "illness" in the rest of the NT.  It is also of particular comfort, as I've mentioned before, that the great apostle asked the Lord Jesus, the great physician, by whose wounds we have been healed, to take away the thorn, the illness and he said no.

However, the main thing in this passage for me is the main point that God makes to Paul and which Paul makes in relation to himself.  Let me restate the points the text makes personally.  "God's grace is sufficient for me while I suffer the effects of chemo therapy.  His power is made perfect in my weakness, my cancer and its treatment.  I will boast all the more gladly in my weakness today so that the power of Christ might rest on me.  For the sake of Christ then I am content with this weakness, this pain, this interruption of my life, this being disconnected from people, this inability to do much of anything, this fog, this uncertainty; because when I am weak, like I am right now, then is when I am really strong."

What does this actually mean in the midst of the suffering that his grace is sufficient for me and that right now, in this weakness, I am stronger than I ever was before I knew I had cancer?  I've talked with several friends about this.  I definitely do not have a full or maybe even a partial answer to the question.  I am certain that learning what this means in my own experience is what I want and I think God wants for me also.  I think I have a little understanding if I limit my inquiry to simply considering what does it mean to say that God's grace is sufficient for me in this weakness.

One of the things that I am very aware of as I sit in the chair with chemicals and fluid being pumped into me and when I sit in the chair at home unable to do much is of how great my sins are and of how great God's grace is towards me in that he does not and will not hold my sins against me because of Christ's dying and rising for me.  I am regularly brought to tears (which really hurts, it's a side effect) when I think of all the ways I have failed to love God and to love others.  I feel deeply how unworthy I am of God's love for me.  Always immediately upon that sorrow for sin follows the sweet knowledge that God does love me and that Christ has suffered the hell I deserve and is risen so that I can be counted perfectly righteous in God's sight.  The grace of God in Christ truly is sufficient for me in this sense: that if I never get better, yet I am loved by God and secure in that love and will live with him forever and thus I have nothing to fear and must simply hold on. 

The one thing I am sure of in this is that I am not thinking about this correctly.  I think of power primarily as "power to act, to do something" and I do not think that is what God means here.  It's time for bed.  I will pick this up tomorrow.  I'm too weak to go on right now.