The word "goad" is rarely used in modern English. When it is, it is generally used as a verb, as when someone is "goaded into" doing something foolish by the taunts of his peers. As a noun, a goad was a long rod with an iron point at the end, used to persuade oxen to go where the cattlemen wanted the large beasts to go.

The metaphor Paul described is a dramatic scene with God pushing Paul toward the right direction just as a herder would move oxen along. Instead of responding wisely to the pointed stick, Paul not only resisted, but even kicked the sharp end of the goad, doing serious damage and causing himself pain, without any effect to the One on the other end of the stick. This is a ridiculous response to a goad, one that animals learned quickly not to do.

There's an old joke in a similar vein that describes a man visiting his country doctor. The man lifts his arm and says. "Doc, it hurts when I do this." The doctor responds, "Then don't do that!"

When Paul was offering his defense to King Agrippa, he intentionally portrayed his entire life before the Damascus event as rebellious foolishness, but we can all understand why Paul did what he did. As a child, he had shown the intelligence and brilliance to be selected into the best Hebrew religious school and to excel at his studies. He had devoted his life to what his teachers had told him was the right direction, and he had gained considerable respect and admiration in his role as a religious leader. We can empathize with the massive change it required for Paul to reject what he had been taught and what he had become in order to follow Christ, and we can marvel at the love of God that would send Jesus to appear in a blinding light to Paul on the Damascus road.

But Paul, looking back over his life, must have recognized that in all his education and all his success, he was fighting against something he couldn't understand. It might have been a gnawing inner struggle that compelled him to achieve "stardom" among the Pharisees. In retrospect, Paul must have felt that his achievements never gained him the satisfaction and peace that he had expected, for as much as he tried to please God, God still pulled him in another direction.

We all have sinned, we all have fallen short of what God intends, so we all find ourselves kicking against the goads. Most of us are smarter than Paul in that we stop kicking, but we still stand foolishly waiting for the sharp points to go away rather than turning and following the path that the Shepherd wants us to follow. We might even celebrate that the pain has ended when we stop throwing ourselves against the goads, not realizing that we are missing the incredible Good that God wants for us.

How do we know when discomfort in our life is God goading us to follow a different direction? Is a flu bug a warning to us from God, is it Satan's effort to block what we would be doing, or is it the inevitable result of living outside the Garden of Eden? Is that empty feeling inside us the result of our own failures, an urging from God to change our lives, or the results of immersing ourselves in others' pain as we share God's Love with them?

The secret to getting answers to these questions is to look past the goad and ask the Shepherd directly. More than that, the most fundamental requirement in following Christ is to be in an active, personal dialog with Jesus Christ. It is the very act of asking the Shepherd that is so vital to our spiritual existence that all the other questions fade in comparison.

We are so experienced and so adept at kicking against the goads. Experiencing pain in life can feel more comfortable to us than the fear of answers to questions we can't bring ourselves to ask. But when we put it in Paul's terms, the only reasonable action is to surrender to the goads, and to allow God to continue transforming us.