The GPS Said You've Arrived

In 2018, a paramedic named Rachel Torres responded to an overdose call in a Tucson apartment complex. She had been on dozens of these runs, and somewhere along the way she had hardened. She moved through the motions efficiently, clinically, quietly resenting the people she was saving. They were the problem, she told herself. They were wasting her time and taxpayer money.

Then she walked through the door and found her own brother on the floor.

Everything she had constructed — every wall, every judgment, every certainty about who deserved help and who didn't — collapsed in a single moment. She dropped to her knees not just as a paramedic, but as a sister, a human being confronted by how deeply wrong she had been. The very people she had dismissed were people exactly like someone she loved.

Saul of Tarsus was charging toward Damascus with arrest warrants in his bag and righteousness in his chest. He knew exactly who the enemy was. Then a light knocked him to the ground and a voice asked the most disorienting question in Scripture: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" The people he was hunting turned out to be the body of the very Lord he claimed to serve.

Sometimes the Almighty doesn't gently redirect us. Sometimes He puts us flat on our backs because nothing less will shatter the story we've been telling ourselves. The road to Damascus always runs through the death of our certainty.