The Coal That Changed Blaise Pascal's Life

On the night of November 23, 1654, the brilliant French mathematician Blaise Pascal had an encounter so overwhelming that he could barely find words for it. For two hours, beginning around 10:30 PM, Pascal experienced what he later described simply as "FIRE." He was so undone by the presence of the living God that he scribbled his experience onto a scrap of parchment — raw, fragmented, almost incoherent with awe. "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars," he wrote. "Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

Pascal, one of the finest minds in Europe, had spent years constructing elegant proofs and theorems. Yet in that moment, all his intellectual architecture crumbled before the holiness of the Almighty. Like Isaiah in the temple, Pascal discovered that encountering God does not begin with understanding — it begins with being undone.

He sewed that parchment into the lining of his coat and carried it against his chest for the rest of his life. It was only discovered after his death.

Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, and his first response was not theology but confession: "Woe is me! For I am undone." Yet God did not leave him shattered. A burning coal touched his lips, guilt was taken away, and the trembling prophet became a willing servant: "Here am I. Send me." Pascal's fire, like Isaiah's coal, did not destroy — it transformed. The question is whether we are willing to let it.