Scotland has been on my thoughts lately.  Having lived there for a year, and visited last summer, it is a familiar place.  It is a magical place, where one steps from this high tech and busy world back into the medieval world of castles and kings and queens.  It is a “thin place”—where heaven and earth seem to intersect at places like Iona.  It is a place of thorns.  The national flower is a thistle.  Driving through the rich, verdant countryside one’s eyes are repeatedly greeted by the sight of the thistle with the purple plume crowning its head.  It is a reminder, to me, of the Christian life.

While most Christians desire glorious thrones on earth, the promise of our Lord is that we will have thorns.  St. Paul is an example of this, with his words in 2 Cor. 12:7 describing his struggle with his own personal thorn.  It is no accident that our Lord Jesus wore a crown of thorns on His head in His crucifixion.  He would wear a crown of glory in His resurrection, but for this life His adornment was thorns.  Is this not true for us as well?

What thorns are besetting us as we begin this New Year?  What thorn have we begged the Lord to take from us, only to be told that Christ’s grace is sufficient?  Rather than rebelling against the thorns of this life, we should relish them.  Like the Scots we should see them as thistles that adorn this foreign country that we call home, until we reach our true country, our eternal kingdom of heaven.  In faith we are called to see not only the thorns, but also the purple that adorns this life.  It is the purple of kings and queens.  Not the kings and queens of Scotland, but of Christ’s kingdom.  It is the purple that our Lord Himself wore on his way to the cross.  It is the purple of God’s priesthood, that we have been cloaked with in righteousness that is not our own.  It is the color that reminds us that one day we will also wear the crown of glory in heaven, but until then we can, like St. Paul, be thankful for the thistles and thorns that adorn the roadways of this life.