“They Glorified God Because of Me” by Melanie Rigney

“They Glorified God Because of Me” by Melanie Rigney

Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

And I was unknown personally to the churches of Judea that are in Christ; they only kept hearing that “the one who once was persecuting us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” So, they glorified God because of me. (Galatians 1:22-24)

Guide me, Lord, along the everlasting way. (Psalm 139:24b)

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)

Piety

Lord, use me as You will, imperfect as I am and lovable as You say I am. Help me to remember Your love is all, not the skepticism with which others may view my work for You.

Study

We understand why Christians might have been taken aback initially by Paul’s conversion. After all, he’d been at Stephen’s stoning. He had seemed to enjoy persecuting people like them. Now, there he was, saying he was one of them, evangelizing in Jesus’s name, he, Paul, who had not traveled with Christ during His time on earth.

But there it was.

They had two choices, those Christians: turn him away or welcome him, seeing his conversion as a sign of God’s mercy and power.

At the time, they didn’t know that Paul would be among the Church’s most powerful and influential evangelists ever through his preaching and his letters. They didn’t know he would be jailed and tortured and keep on going until his martyrdom.

But those in the early Church managed to put away the very human, very understandable emotions that told them not to trust Paul. They accepted God found something of use in him, just as God had found something of use in them. They chose not to wait and see how long or how deep Paul’s conversion went. They believed in God, whether or not they privately believed in Paul initially.

And so, when we are tempted to discount someone’s apparent change of heart or soul as personally or politically expedient, may we follow their example. May we err on the side of being made a charlatan’s fool rather than being shown to be a doubter of God.   

Action

Believe in a conversion.

 

Image credit: Jacob van Oost le jeune / Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bergues_musee_van_oost_jeune_st_paul.jpg