Note: On Tuesdays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
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 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.
