When the bomb went off on a road near Baghdad, Hilbert Caesar thought his life was over.

What he discovered was … it was just beginning.

According to The Washington Post (November 26, 2005), Army staff sergeant Caesar was in charge of a long-range howitzer — a self-propelled gun that resembles a tank. He was out on patrol in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded. When the smoke cleared, Caesar looked down and saw that his right leg was severed in three places, just dangling by the skin. He tried to give his machine gun to a fellow soldier, but discovered it was bent. Then he yelled for the howitzer hatches to be closed, and thought to himself, “Oh man. This is it. My life is over.”

But he didn’t die. The insurgents responsible for the attack disappeared, and Caesar was transported to safety. At Walter Reed Hospital, his missing limb was replaced with an artificial leg of plastic and steel.

Still, he felt despair about his future. He was in pain, and was worried that he’d never be able to run again, or be attractive to women. He received word that eight men from his platoon had been killed by a car bomb in Baghdad, including one of his role models.. The news was devastating.

But little by little he began to shift focus. Caesar met other injured soldiers and heard them talk about their recoveries. He began to look for the best, and realized that he was fortunate to make it back from battle with just one missing limb. “I’m grateful for that,” he told The Washington Post. “I’m thankful for just being here.”

Caesar now completes marathons in racing wheelchairs, and has found a job with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He sees the loss of his leg as a minor setback, and believes that he has come out of the war with more wisdom, compassion, and appreciation for life.

Hilbert Caesar has experienced “post-traumatic growth.”

A number of psychiatrists and psychologists are beginning to see that not all soldiers return from war with shattered spirits. A number are emerging from the experience feeling enhanced. Now this is not to say that war is desirable or healthy or good. But it can lead to personal growth.

Same thing happened to the apostle Paul after he was stabbed with a thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7). We don’t know exactly what this thorn was, although biblical scholars have suggested that it could have been anything from epilepsy to stuttering, depression to eye problems. What’s important is that Paul considered this affliction to be a painful trap or torture designed to take him out of the spiritual battle plan.

Back in the first century, sharpened wooden stakes were often placed in pits, with the hope that enemy soldiers would fall on them and be impaled. They were also used as a method of torture. Sharpened stakes were the roadside bombs of the ancient world, and they were described in Greek by the word skolops — the exact same word that Paul uses for his thorn in the flesh.

So Paul was stabbed — by a messenger of Satan, he says — “to torment me, to keep me from being too elated” (v. 7). He could have given up, assuming that his life as an apostle was over. But instead, he discovered that it was just beginning.

Three times he pleaded with the Lord to remove the skolops, but God said to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9)..

Power is made perfect in weakness. As amputee Hilbert Caesar says, “It makes me appreciate life a whole lot more.”

Power is make perfect in weakness. As Adam Replogle, a tank gunner who lost his left hand in Iraq, says, “Sometimes it takes people a lifetime to realize what it’s all about … you go through something like this and it grows you up a little bit.”

Power is made perfect in weakness. As Tom McNish, a former Air Force pilot who was a prisoner in North Vietnam, reflects: “There is no question in my mind that the experience I had in Vietnam has had an overall very positive effect on my life.”

Not that McNish recommends it for anyone else. Or that he would want to do it again. It was truly a time of suffering, after all. But you can’t have post-traumatic growth without trauma.

Think of a time when you have experienced spiritual growth. A shift in priorities. An increase in personal strength. A renewed appreciation for life. A deepening of personal relationships. Have these improvements been the result of smooth sailing and easy living?

Hardly. These kinds of growth come from stress, struggle, and suffering.

My daughter Sadie is starting college this fall, and she’s going to Duke, where I was an undergraduate a few years ago. As I think about the challenges she’ll face over the next four years, I recall my own college experience, and I remember how I started out as a biology major, assuming that I’d become some kind of research scientist. But then a horrible experience in organic chemistry, one that was completely humiliating and led to my first ever failing grade, caused me to rethink this plan. My trauma in chemistry coincided with a fantastic experience in biblical studies, and I discovered that I was really the happiest when I focused on religion classes and on participation in the campus Christian community. Looking back, I’m so glad I suffered a failure in chemistry, because it broke me out of my self-imposed focus on a scientific career, and it shifted me into the courses and the community where God wanted me to discover my calling.

Each of us can tell such a tale, and there are bound to be several unifying themes. First, trauma moves us from isolation to community. And second, it shifts us from self-reliance to God-reliance.

Looking back on his experience in battle, Hilbert Caesar says, “The guys I served with were awesome guys.” Times of pain and suffering can force us to turn to each other, rely on each other, and serve each other — sometimes in sacrificial ways. “I would go through it again — for the guys I served with,” Caesar insists. “Yes. Absolutely. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

In the life of the church, it is typically trauma that moves us from isolation to community. Sure, festivities can be fun, but their effect is usually superficial. What binds us together as members of the Body of Christ are illness, grief, struggle, adversity, confusion and crisis.

Share a meal with a neighbor at a potluck, and you’ve got contact. Carry a meal to neighbor after a death in the family, and you’ve got community. I hear this again and again at FPC, as people feel the love of this congregation after they have suffered a crisis or a loss.

Soldiers find that they gain strength and inspiration from each other as they talk about their injuries and their recoveries. They become more resilient as they offer encouragement and support. The same is true as we gather in the church to talk honestly about our struggles, and to share insights we’ve gained from our successes and failures. Whether the challenge is raising teenagers, overcoming addictions, managing money, or adjusting to the loss of a loved one, there is a tremendous benefit in moving from isolation to community.

When we gather together, we discover that power truly is made perfect in weakness. This is a spiritual truth — one that we want to share with one another, including the children of this church, little ones such as Benjamin Campbell, baptized today.

The second benefit of trauma is that it shifts us from self-reliance to God-reliance. This was a major move for the apostle Paul, a superstar of the early Church. In his letter to the Philippians, he describes his qualifications by saying, “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more … a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews … as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:4-6).

In other words: Yale College, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Law, Wall Street, The White House. But Paul tosses all these credentials away, pitches them into the garbage, because he has discovered the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord. For Paul, a connection to Christ is what saves him from sin and makes him right with God, and he values this relationship above all else.

Because of Jesus, Paul moves from self-reliance to God-reliance.

But this is not the end of his story. To keep him from being too elated, a thorn is plunged into his flesh. This skolops, this sharpened stake, this roadside bomb, this personal trauma, is given to him to keep him from being too elated by his abundance of revelations from the Lord. Paul knows that even good revelations can shift his focus away from God and toward himself, and so the thorn is given to keep him connected to Christ.

“Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me,” admits Paul, “but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness’” (vv. 8-9). Paul begs that the thorn will be removed, just as veterans of war plead that their pain will end. But the message Paul gets is that God’s grace is sufficient, in any trauma, in any time, in any situation.

God’s grace is sufficient. God’s gift of himself, his gift of Jesus, is enough — enough to overcome any obstacle.

This is what Paul learns in his time of post-traumatic growth: God’s grace is sufficient. It’s something that we can learn as well, as we becoming increasingly reliant on God, and discover his grace in our community. It is when we accept our weakness that the power of Christ is best able to dwell in us. “Whenever I am weak,” concludes Paul, “then I am strong” (v. 10).

Reliance on God moves us from weakness to strength, from agony to ecstasy, from cross to resurrection.

It’s a perfect power. One that is found on the other side of pain. Amen.


Sources:
Ruane, Michael. “From Wounds, Inner Strength.” The Washington Post. November 26, 2005. A1.
Sampley, J. Paul. “Second Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000). 161-168.