“He laid his hands on Saul and said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus…
has sent me to you so that you may regain your sight
and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’’
Acts 9:17
In 2005, Lori and I attended my college reunion. Other than a similar gathering ten years earlier, I had not returned for any of the intervening reunions. As a result, there was some significant catching up to be done. A quarter-century was more than enough time for there to have been some physical changes in the appearance of my classmates and me along with ample time for accomplishments and challenges to have taken place for all of us.
Over that weekend, I recognized some classmates from a distance and was unsure who a couple were even after a conversation. I chatted with contemporaries who were already grandparents and others who had never married, some who had taken early retirement and others with ongoing positions of responsibility in education or industry, medicine or government. A few of my former classmates asked how a Southern boy like me had ended up in Pennsylvania yet for the most part they didn’t question that this former economics major had ended up in the ministry. One man, though, had a different and audible reaction.
We saw each other at dinner on our final night of the reunion. I had not run into him since commencement, but could have picked him out of a crowd anywhere as he looked exactly the same 25 years later. I asked what he had been doing in the intervening years–work, family and such–and after filling in some of the gaps he asked “So what kind of work are you in?’ “I’m a minister,” I said. “Really?” he replied as if waiting for the punch-line to a joke. “Yes,” I added. “I’ve been a minister for 18 years.” To which he said “I just can’t see that” and walked away.
In fairness to him, we didn’t have the opportunity to speak of what had transpired in the years following graduation or how my sense of call to the ministry began after having worked for three years with the telephone company. Even so, his spontaneous and candid remark highlights how persons can hold onto a single picture of others and not allow for the possibility of change.
The verse we read earlier come after a reaction just like that. Saul, one who had persecuted first-century Christians with fervor had an encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. The moment transformed the man’s heart for good, but it also left him blind for three days.
Soon thereafter Jesus appeared in a vision to a man named Ananias and urged him to go to Saul. “At this moment,” Jesus said, Saul “is praying and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” Ananias replied “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he had done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” In other words “I know this guy and want to stay clear of him!” Jesus was not deterred.
“Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.” Soon thereafter, Ananias carries out his mission. “He laid his hands on Saul and said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus…has sent me to you so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’’The prayer is answered immediately and Saul is transformed into Paul, the first missionary of the church.
His experience is a good reminder to us in times of graduations and reunions, family gatherings and other encounters with someone else from our past that people can and do change. And that even if we struggle to see the transformation in the other that God does, including when it happens in us.
God of all conversions, I thank you for the ways you changed me. Help me see that same possibility in others, especially those I think I have all figured out. Amen.
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