If there is one experience in life that is common to every person present here this morning, it is that we all have troubles of some kind. The other thing that binds us all together this morning is our distaste for problems.
Trouble is a part of the human condition that is inescapable.
Though we cannot get rid of trouble as an ingredient of life, we do have some choice about our attitude toward our troubles. We have some choice in what we do with troubles. As we read that passage it would be easy for us to get bogged down in trying to figure out just what his thorn in the flesh might have been. To do that, is to miss the point of the passage. I think Paul deliberately refrains from telling us what his problem was for fear that we will concentrate on the problem to the exclusion of the real point of the passage.