Augustine's Garden

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent years chasing pleasure, ambition, and intellectual pride. He kept a mistress. He hoarded prestige. He knew the truth of God yet clung to his old life like a man gripping a fraying rope over a cliff.

Then he heard a child's voice from a neighboring yard — "Take up and read." He opened Paul's letter to the Romans and read words that cut through every excuse: "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh."

Augustine later described that moment as if chains fell from his wrists. The man who had prayed, "Lord, make me pure — but not yet," finally released his grip on the old self. He abandoned his teaching post, broke off his engagement to a wealthy heiress, and gave away most of his possessions. Within two years, he was baptized. Within a decade, he became a bishop whose writings would shape Christianity for sixteen centuries.

Paul tells the Colossians to "put to death" what belongs to the earthly nature — impurity, greed, anger — and to "put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator." Augustine's garden reminds us that this transformation is not gradual self-improvement. It is a death and a resurrection. The old garments must hit the ground before the new ones can be worn.