Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
It’s not a quick death, stoning.
It takes about a half hour, and you get bruised and battered and bloodied. Probably, you pray for one of the first stones to knock you unconscious.
Perhaps it was Stephen’s intent that his discourse about the crowd’s failure to accept Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecies would anger the people so much that his death 
would come quickly. Or perhaps he didn’t really care about that, but saw those closing moments as one final evangelization opportunity. Either way, his body already damaged, he emulated Jesus’s own example on the cross and prayed for forgiveness of his persecutors.
Now, some of those in attendance likely threw stones all the harder for Stephen’s audacity to call on forgiveness for them. Some probably considered him foolish for offering up his body, when all he would have had to have done to live was to quit talking about Jesus.
But for at least one of those in attendance, Stephen’s dignity and fearlessness planted a seed. It didn’t take immediate, visible root in Saul; he would go on to persecute Christians relentlessly until that ah-ha moment on the road to Damascus. But Saul, later called Paul, never forgot his presence when the first Christian was martyred.
It’s not a quick death, being a Christian and picking up our crosses and following daily.
It takes a lifetime, and we get bruised and battered and bloodied, emotionally and mentally if not physically. But the persecution becomes easier to bear when we remember this isn’t about us, but about Him… and bringing as many people to Him as we can.
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