Saul on the road

Saul is riding hard for Damascus, arrest warrants folded in his bag, when the light throws him to the ground. He had been the most zealous defender of the old order alive, certain to his bones that he was serving God by hunting down the followers of the Way. And out of the light comes a voice that names him and undoes him in the same word: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me. Me. The One he thought he was defending God against is the One he has been wounding. In a single instant the whole framework he had built his life upon lies in pieces in the dust, and the man who arrived as the persecutor cannot even see; they have to lead him by the hand into the city. For three days he sits blind in the dark. Then Ananias comes, and something like scales falls from his eyes, and he can see, and he rises and is baptized. The break of conversion can be exactly this violent — a life cut cleanly in two, a before and an after with a flash of light between them, the persecutor unmade so that the apostle can be born.

God sometimes interrupts a life mid-stride, hard enough to put a person flat on the ground in the road. We picture conversion and renewal as gentle, a slow warming, a quiet turning. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is a light that knocks you down and takes your sight and leaves you groping in the dark for three days, no longer sure of the one thing you were surest of. If your upheaval did that to you — if it cut your life cleanly into before and after and left you blind for a stretch — you are in old and good company. Do not despair of the blindness. Saul did not arrange the scales to fall; he sat in the dark and waited, and in their own time they fell. The violence of the break is not a sign that God has abandoned you to it. For the man on the Damascus road, being struck down was the beginning of seeing, and the blindness was never meant to last.