Maxwell Strachan, with The Huffington Post , reports:
Fouad Baka of Algeria finished a 1500-meter race in just 3 minutes and 49.59 seconds at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
That’s fast, so fast that if Baka had finished with that time at that exact stadium in August, he would have beat out Matthew Centrowitz Jr. of the U.S. for the Olympic gold medal. Centrowitz Jr. finished the final in 3 minutes and 50 seconds.
Unfortunately for Baka, he wasn’t racing in the Olympics. He was racing in the Paralympics, where not one or two runners finished ahead of him, but three. [1]
What if instead of being handicapped by a handicap, you became better, faster, stronger? Would it change the way you looked at your handicap? That’s what happened to the Apostle Paul after he was afflicted with what he called, a “thorn in the flesh.” After repeatedly praying for deliverance, Paul was told, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Once Paul realized that God intended his disadvantage to work out to his spiritual advantage, he proclaimed, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).
Paul became an enthusiastic member of God’s paralympic team. How about you? Are you choosing to embrace the disadvantages in your life, seeing them as opportunities to allow the power of Christ to flow through you?
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1. “Four Paralympians Just Ran The 1500m Faster Than Anyone At The Rio Olympics Final,” Maxwell Strachan, Senior Editor, The Huffington Post , September 12, 2016.
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #14184]