This Story Never Made Sense to Me

This Sunday’s reading is the Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus story from Acts 9. On the surface, it’s kind of wild – a blinding light out of nowhere, a voice from heaven, an instant and total life reversal. It reads less like real life and more like something you’d expect people to argue about, and to be fair, we did. We had a lively conversation about it in our staff meeting this week, poking at all the parts that feel over-the-top or hard to believe.

And honestly, I’m glad we did. Because if you just accept it at face value, it’s easy to move on too quickly and treat it like a strange, one-off moment in someone else’s life. But if you slow down and sit with it, it starts to raise a more unsettling question… one that hits a lot closer to home.

I used to think life was something I could control. Like if I made the right choices and worked hard enough, I could design a life where everything would make sense. And to be fair, that works for a while… Until it doesn’t. Eventually, something interrupts the pattern.

I don’t mean the kind of bad day or a rough season you power through. I mean the kind of interruption that starts messing with the assumptions you’ve been building your life on.

I think a lot of us have been there. I know I’ve been there more than once. And sure – now I can say those seasons were “good for me.” I learned things. I changed. Maybe even became better because of it. But let’s not pretend I knew that at the time.

In the middle of it, it didn’t feel like growth. It felt like everything was getting harder to explain. Like I was trying to make the pieces fit… and they just wouldn’t. There was no moment where I paused and thought, wow, what a beautiful season of personal development.

In Acts 9, Saul has a life that makes sense to him. He knows who he is and what he’s doing. He’s not wandering – he’s moving forward with purpose.

And then, without warning, the whole thing breaks. And what follows isn’t clarity. It’s blindness. That might be the most relatable part of the story. Because when your framework cracks and the thing you built your life around doesn’t hold, you don’t instantly gain a better perspective. You enter a space where what used to guide you doesn’t anymore, and what comes next hasn’t shown up yet.

For me, the hardest part is this: You don’t get to control what replaces the old story. You can’t force a new direction or design your way out of it. You just sit in it… disoriented and dependent. Trying to figure out how to move when you can’t see the road ahead.

We’re not very good at that. We want resolution as quickly as possible. We want the next step. The better plan. The clearer vision. But this story lingers in the interruption and the loss of control. 

I suppose growth doesn’t start when things make sense again. It seems to start right here – when the story you were living in breaks. And for a while, you must learn how to move without being able to see.

Thankfully, that’s not the end of the story. Saul doesn’t stay blind forever. He’s led. He’s helped. He’s called brother before he knows how to be one.

Which means even in the disorientation, he’s not alone. Neither are we.