Augustine's Confession in the Garden

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent years enslaved to desires he could not master. "Grant me chastity," he had once prayed with devastating honesty, "but not yet." He knew what was right. He could articulate virtue with the eloquence of a trained orator. But his body, he believed, owned him.

Then he heard a child's voice from a neighboring house chanting, "Take up and read." He opened the apostle Paul's letter to the Romans and read words that pierced him like light through a shutter. In that moment, Augustine stopped negotiating with his appetites. He did not simply reform his habits — he surrendered the deed to his whole self.

For the next forty-four years, Augustine poured that same body into preaching, writing, and shepherding the church at Hippo. The hands that had once grasped at fleeting pleasure now penned Confessions and City of God. The voice that had sold rhetoric to the highest bidder proclaimed the Gospel to North Africa.

Paul told the Corinthians, "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." Augustine discovered that the freedom he thought he would lose by yielding his body to God was the only freedom worth having. The temple is not ours to desecrate — it belongs to the One who purchased it.