Augustine's Long Road Home

In the summer of 386 AD, Augustine of Hippo sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. He was thirty-one, brilliant, restless, and haunted by the wreckage of his younger years — a string of broken relationships, stolen pears from a neighbor's orchard just for the thrill of it, and a decade spent chasing philosophies that left him emptier than before.

Then he heard a child's voice from a neighboring yard singing a strange refrain: "Tolle lege. Tolle lege." Take up and read. He seized a scroll of Paul's letter to the Romans, and the first passage his eyes fell upon cracked something open inside him that all his intellect never could.

What is remarkable about Augustine is not just the dramatic conversion but what followed — forty years of humbly learning God's ways, one faltering step at a time. The man who had been so confident in his own brilliance became a student again, sitting at the feet of the Almighty, begging to be shown paths he had never walked.

This is the very prayer of Psalm 25. David lifts his soul to God and pleads, "Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths." He does not pretend the sins of his youth never happened. He asks God to remember him not according to those failures but according to His mercy and steadfast love.

Augustine discovered what David already knew: God does not require a clean record. He asks only for open hands, a humble heart, and the willingness to trust Him one step at a time.