If you think of the great conversions in Christian history—the kind of transformation in a person's life that actually went far enough to make a significant impact on the world—perhaps it is the Apostle Paul who first comes to mind. There are few accounts more dramatic than Paul's experience along the Damascus road.See Acts 9:1-20.
The clash of old prejudices with the new spiritual light of God's truth was so intense that Paul was literally blinded—but blinded so that he might finally see. When his vision was restored three days later, he was "seeing" things he had never known before. Paul was awakened to a spiritual power and purpose that compelled him to give all for Christ, Truth. What then came forth in his preaching, writing, living, and his healing work has continued to shake the world for nearly two thousand years.
Another of the great conversions in the early record of Christianity was that of St. Augustine during the fourth century. To that point in his experience, Augustine had led a life of severe paradox. His tremendous intellectual zeal in the pursuit of wisdom was rivaled only by what seemed an equally extreme sensuality. Then came his conversion. One writer, quoting Augustine's own Confessions, tells of the moment that signaled the extraordinary change in Augustine's life: "After years of struggle with lust and skepticism about the faith, he sat one day musing in a Milan garden. There he heard a child say, 'Tolle lege'—take and read. He then 'snatched up' the Letter to the Romans and read until his 'heart was filled with a light of confidence and all the shadows of [his] doubt were swept away.'"Richard J. Foster, "The Good Life," Christianity Today, December 11, 1987, p. 20.
