It occurred to me today that I have been jealous of the conversion stories of other people.

I’ve often found myself listening to the conversion stories of other Christians and being jealous; thinking to myself, “Wow! What a great story of God’s redemption, grace, and forgiveness!”

The story of the person, at the end of their rope, at rock bottom, when God appears and makes Himself known through the example of Jesus, so the sinner can turn from their sinful ways and begin to walk down a better road, toward a better way of doing things; I’ve always been jealous of stories like that. My conversion story is not like that –> it’s not very inspirational.

I was raised in the church, I was baptized as a teenager, I have been working on my faith and my relationship with God for all of my life. I’ve committed no major crimes or moral indiscretions. I’ve never been at the rock bottom of anything.

Or, take the example of the man responsible for writing a majority chunk of the New Testament; Saul of Tarsus. Imagine walking around, persecuting The Gospel of Christ, when God reaches down and forcefully turns you onto a better road. God chose Saul to become the ultimate example of a conversion story.

How awesome would that be?!?!

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I’ve actually been sitting on this post for a couple of months, not knowing quite what I wanted to say on the matter. I brought it up recently with a close friend of mine, with whom I share a common past when it comes to conversion stories, and he said to me:

“I look at my past and the way that I’ve been able to live my life so far as a blessing. I think my conversion story is the way that God intended them all to be, and that other conversion stories, while they might be great instances of God’s merciful forgiveness, aren’t examples of how things are supposed to go. We are supposed to be raised by faithful parents. We are supposed to make their faith our own at the proper age. It’s like being jealous of an amputation scar.”

When this friend of mine said this to me, I immediately thought of Mark, Chapter 2 (also Matthew, Chapter 9 and Luke, Chapter 5), when Jesus tells the Pharisees that He came to call sinners. When I pair this with information from Romans, Chapter 3 (especially verse 23), I come to the conclusion that I am no better or worse than anyone else, despite my opinions to the contrary. When I think of myself as a ‘boring conversion story’, those who have really wonderful stories to tell would probably be jealous of me, since I didn’t have to go through any of the things that they all went through.

Then, as I was thinking about that, I thought of Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son in Luke, Chapter 15. A lot of retellings of this story stop when the prodigal son returns and the father is glad to have what he’d lost; however, there is the other son’s –the brother’s– story that comes in verses 25-32. I guess I sometimes feel like that guy does.

Except that guy is most certainly meant to represent the self-righteous Pharisees, who were most certainly listening to Jesus when He was telling the ‘lost’ parables that He told in Luke 15.

I guess that the bottom line is this: we are all ‘lost’ before our conversion to Christ. While some might be more ‘lost’ and others might be less ‘lost’, it doesn’t make either position enviable. The best part of being ‘found’ is that you are no longer ‘lost’. What Jesus is saying in this particular chapter of The Gospel is that it is always a great thing when what was ‘lost’ ends up being ‘found’.

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Part of what I envy in these situations is the ‘rags to riches’ story. Who can deny the appeal of movies like Annie or Pretty Woman or Rocky or The Pursuit of Happiness? Don’t you just love to see it when a down-and-out character is able to make their way to the top?

Is there a greater possible ‘top’ than being redeemed by Christ?

The problem with the movies, as I am often reminding my children, is that they often don’t represent reality well. For every ‘Annie’, rescued from an orphanage, there are hundreds of children who grow up in loving homes with loving parents in their lives. That situation, albeit less inspirational, is much more real, statistically speaking. For every ‘Saul of Tarsus’ conversion story, there are probably plenty of stories of the ‘lesser lost’.

And, I’ll bet, God sees all of this differently from His perspective.

A Holy God, who is disgusted by our sin, probably sees very little difference between the ‘greater lost’ and the ‘lesser lost’. Just as I imagine that God doesn’t think that an eighty year old is that much older than an eight year old, having existed for all of time, God probably doesn’t think that much of my pedigree –> I’d imagine that He is less-than-impressed.

What makes the story of Saul and his conversion so impressive isn’t as much about the horrible person that he was, but rather the powerful tool he became in God’s hands. With that in mind, you don’t necessarily need to have a wonderful tale of desperation-turned-salvation in order to be an effective tool in God’s hands.