So you want a Damascus Road Conversion Experience?

“You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment,” wrote Screwtape, the titular bureaucrat in the infernal Lowerarchy, to his nephew Wormwood, out on his first temptation assignment in C.S. Lewis’s classic novel. “But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use.” 

I often envy Paul for his dramatic conversion experience. It would be hunky dory with me if the Irresistible and the Indisputable could answer my questions, put my doubts to rest, and give me clear instructions all in one go. Like the Beach Boys sang, “Wouldn’t it be nice?”

Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”
—Acts 9:1-6

I mean! Talk about clear, direct marching orders! 

Of course, I don’t intend to suggest Paul had every detail of doctrine and discipline worked out from the get-go. For instance, he was careful to distinguish between divine commands and his personal opinion.

When Paul did claim God-given authority for his teachings, those teachings, he told us, were revealed to him directly by Jesus, without human intermediaries or instructors.

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. —Galatians 1:11-12

The Letter of James, in what may have been a not-so-subtle swipe at Paul (with whom the author of James seems to have differed on a number of points), says, Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.

Yet Paul had the whole of the Roman world to teach. With a burden that great, maybe a doubt-erasing vision mightn’t be worth the labor and hardship.  Jesus warned those who followed him that they would have to endure hardness and persecution, and Paul did not shy away from that cup.

To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world—right up to this moment.  —1 Corinthians 4:11-13

But perhaps the most subtly crippling outcome of a Damascus Road conversion experience is that we would be thrown out of the nest prematurely, like baby birds whose wings were not yet fully fledged. When Jesus-in-glory met Saul on the road, wiping away both his certainty and his uncertainty and leaving him temporarily blind and helpless, he also evidently continued to guide, teach, and encourage him during the time Saul spent in fasting and prayer until the disciple Ananias arrived to restore his sight. The chastened ex-Pharisee, now known as Paul, strode into the Mediterranean world full of assurance, authority, and determination, even in the absence of a Master of Divinity degree and four units of Clinical Pastoral Education. Had I that little time to “strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees” (Isaiah 35:3), I think I might have collapsed under the weight of my own unfitness. For into that vanishingly brief moment, Jesus did use “the Irresistible and the Indisputable” to bypass his own “scheme”—the slow, steady growth of believers into disciples—by compressing years of Christian formation into a few days.

And this slow, steady growth is really the point, isn’t it? The plants that spring up quickly soon wither away for lack of depth (see Matthew 13:1–23, Mark 4:1–20, Luke 8:4–15). The plant that patiently puts down deep, firm roots is able to withstand disease and drought. And spiritual drought—the dryness and desolation of the soul in relation to God—is one of the most deadly, yet, if endured, also the most fruitful. It is the time during which we grow into the people God wants us to be. 

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood,” Screwtape warned his young protégé. “Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Maybe I don’t need to be a special case after all.