Find Wonder

The other three encounters in this series involve people who are depleted. Saul is not depleted. He is blazing—full of zeal, credentialed, certain, moving with violent conviction in exactly the wrong direction. His is the exhaustion of a closed system: a life sealed against astonishment. He has an answer for everything, which means he has room for nothing new. He has never stopped long enough to wonder. 

Dorothy Sölle, the German liberation theologian, describes wonder as the capacity to be interrupted by what you didn’t expect. By that definition, what happens on the Damascus Road is the purest wonder in the New Testament. Saul is stopped mid-stride, knocked to the ground, blinded, led by the hand into the city. The man who thought he knew everything is reduced to needing someone to lead him to lunch. Scales fall from his eyes and he sees a world he didn’t know existed. Wonder is a blinded man on a road who gets his sight back and immediately starts astonishing everyone who knew him.  

Wonder and rest are the same posture: open hands, open eyes, released certainty.