My kids like to doodle and sketch during church, and I don’t mind because it keeps them quiet (most of the time, but not always – as those who sit around us regularly can attest, but I digress …). Recently, one of the little guys decided to draw a potted fern that was on the stairs in front of the stage.

He carefully sketched each section of the ornate planter but paused before beginning the greenery. He leaned over and whispered, “I’m just going to draw a different plant.” I mouthed back OK, and glanced over occasionally to watch his progress. He began with some graceful, swirly strokes, and as he filled in the lines with leaves here and there, it began to take on the look of an ivy. Then, he added a few sharp triangles along the vines and filled them in hard and black. Thorns. He drew a while longer, and then stopped to examine his work.

Methodically, he went back through the drawing and erased every thorn. He began drawing flowers in their places. As I watched him, I thought to myself: If only it were that easy!  If only we could simply erase the irritating, painful interruptions in life and replace them with loveliness. If only we could just do away with the sharp hurt that pricks our hearts.

How often do we sit and fume, dwelling on the thorns in life? We have figurative pencils in our hands, and we press harder on the page, scribbling the thorn until it gets darker and more prominent. Eventually, we forget the rest of the picture that God is trying to draw for our lives, because we are so focused on that pesky thorn!

Like the Apostle Paul’s experience in 2 Corinthians 12, God may not completely erase the thorns in our lives. Those painful times can teach us important lessons. We can either let the thorns get the best of us, or we can take Paul’s example and willfully decide to praise God, anyway. We can turn those thorns into flowers by the way we choose to think about them. We can even thank God for the thorn (that’s a difficult one, I know!) because walking through the experience with him draws us closer together.