When God asked Ananias to go and minister to Saul — the man who had been dragging Christians off to prison — Ananias had questions. Understandably. "Lord, I have heard about this man. How much evil he has done.”

And God said simply: "Go. He is my chosen instrument.”

It is worth pausing on that. Because Saul was not just an unlikely candidate for conversion. He was the active enemy of everything the early church stood for. And God chose him anyway — not despite his past but somehow through it.

Someone in a Bible study I once led made a point that has stayed with me. She noted that something remarkable must have happened to Saul between his encounter on the road and his emergence as a preacher. A man with that much rage in his heart doesn't simply learn to love overnight. He must have experienced something profound in those days of blindness — and then in the community at Damascus, where Ananias came alongside him, where he was welcomed and loved and slowly transformed.

If God can make his most willing servant out of his fiercest opponent — God can work through anyone.

But here is what strikes me most about this story. God didn't just knock Saul off his horse and leave him to figure it out alone. He sent Ananias. He brought Saul into a community — people who had every reason to be afraid of him, and who came alongside him anyway. These are people who loved him, welcomed him, and slowly became the hands and feet of his transformation.

That is how it almost always works. We rarely change in isolation. We need someone to come alongside us — to model what grace looks like in a human life, to love us before we have earned it, to stay when it would be easier to go. 

Ananias did that for Saul. And most of us have had our own Ananias — someone whose presence in our lives made us more than we could have become alone.

The question worth holding onto today is twofold: who has been that person for you? And who might be waiting for you to be that person for them?

Prayer: Loving God, thank you for the Ananiases in our lives — the ones who came alongside us when we needed it most, who loved us before we had earned it. Make us that person for someone else. Give us the courage to show up, even when it is uncomfortable, and to love people into who you are calling them to become; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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