{"id":4473,"date":"2025-03-12T09:27:08","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T13:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4473"},"modified":"2025-03-12T09:27:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-12T13:27:08","slug":"the-conversion-of-augustine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/12\/the-conversion-of-augustine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Conversion of Augustine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Each day this Lent we\u2019re looking at major \u201cturning points\u201d in Christian history \u2013 moments or seasons in which the story of God\u2019s people took an important and often unexpected turn. \u00a0<\/em>

As Monica saw the sails\u00a0vanish over the horizon, her heart sank.

If God had answered her prayers, that boat would never have left its moorings in North Africa\u00a0340 years after Christ and headed for Italy.\u00a0

Monica’s son Augustine was aboard, and she was certain he was headed for disaster.\u00a0\u00a0

Augustine was brilliant.\u00a0He was also rebellious and self-assured. Monica and her husband Patricius, a Roman official, knew that he was deserving of a first-rate education. As a Christian, she yearned for his studies to acquaint him with Christ. Instead, Augustine maddeningly concluded that Christianity was a religion for simple-minded fools.

Eager to explore what the world had to offer, he took a concubine, fathered a child, and dabbled in theological speculation with the Manicheans, a high-minded cult. Monica begged him to turn to God, but he rebuffed her at every turn.

Ultimately he decided to skip town and sail toward greater adventures in Italy. This would be like a teenage\u00a0kid\u00a0telling his mother that he\u2019s tired of living in Paducah, Kentucky, and wants to find out why everyone\u2019s so excited about Las Vegas.

Monica spent a sleepless night pleading with the Lord to block his path.\u00a0\u201cPlease let him stay here in Africa so that one day he might find and serve you!\u201d\u00a0

All she heard was silence.

Augustine sailed away unhindered, leaving Monica feeling helpless and confused.\u00a0

But God knew best.\u00a0In Italy, the future Saint <\/em>Augustine came under the influence of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, whom he was surprised to discover was anything but a simple-minded fool. The young scholar gradually found himself edging toward an intellectual conversion to Christianity.

He wasn\u2019t quite so excited, however, about surrendering the rest of his body.

Later in life, when he was in his early 40s, Augustine authored the world\u2019s first spiritual autobiography \u2013 a \u201ctell-all\u201d book that astonished the public at its publication in A.D. 400, and remains a fascinating read to this day.

The Confessions<\/em>, comprised of 13 sections written in Latin, is framed as a prayer to God.\u00a0Its opening paragraph includes one of church history\u2019s most quotable quotes:\u00a0\u201cFor You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.\u201d\u00a0

He admits that he had frequently prayed another memorable prayer: \u201cMake me chaste, Lord\u2026but not yet.\u201d\u00a0

Augustine reports that one day he was agonizing over such matters in his garden \u2013 Should I or shouldn\u2019t I go all-in for Jesus?<\/em> \u2013 when he heard the voice of a boy or a girl (he never knew which) chanting over and over the Latin words Tolle Lege, Tolle Lege <\/em>(pronounced \u201ctol-lay lah-jhay\u201d).\u00a0Those words mean, \u201cTake up and read, take up and read.\u201d He tells us that he had never heard this chant before, and was unaware of any children\u2019s game that included, \u201cTake up and read.\u201d\u00a0

It occurred to him that maybe he should do just that.\u00a0But take up and read what?\u00a0Just a few steps away was a copy of Paul\u2019s letter to the Romans.\u00a0Augustine opened the book at random and read the first line he saw.\u00a0It was Romans 13:14: \u201cClothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ,\u00a0and stop thinking about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.\u201d

For Augustine, it was like a bolt out of the blue. This was his turning point. He decided to abandon himself to Jesus.

It proved to be a turning point in Christian history as well.

It\u2019s not a stretch to say that Augustine belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of Christian theologians.\u00a0He changed forever the way that followers of Jesus think about God, truth, Scripture, and time.\u00a0Both Catholics and Protestants claim him as their own. His book City of God<\/em> famously depicts reality as the intermingling of two \u201ccities\u201d \u2013 the City of God, whose citizens are those who trust Christ, and the City of Man, the faith-resisting environment in which people of faith are required to live out their lives. \u00a0

What is the central dilemma of every human being? Augustine suggested that we suffer from \u201cdisordered loves.\u201d\u00a0

We abandon ourselves to worthy endeavors \u2013 to dream jobs, dream relationships, and dream achievements \u2013 only to discover that they are not capable of providing ultimate meaning for our lives. Augustine asserted that it\u2019s OK to love many things.\u00a0But whenever we love anything more than God, we will always end up disappointed.\u00a0

People typically love less important things more, and more important things less.\u00a0The result is the disorder of our lives caused by the disorder of our loves.

That’s because, to put it simply, you are what you love.

Author and pastor Tim Keller observed, \u201cThere is nothing wrong with loving your work, but if you love it more than your family, then your loves are out of order and you may ruin your family.\u00a0Or if you love making money more than you love justice, then you will exploit your employees, again, because your loves are disordered.\u201d\u00a0

The goal is not to stop loving our jobs, our hobbies, and our friendships. It\u2019s to love God more<\/em> than all those things. That allows our \u201clesser loves\u201d to fall into their proper places, where we can really appreciate them for the good things they are (instead of the ultimate things we sometimes imagine them to be).\u00a0

The British playwright Oscar Wilde cynically observed, \u201cIn this world there are only two tragedies.\u00a0One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.\u201d\u00a0

Followers of Jesus have a comeback for that: The greatest tragedy in life is failing to find out, for ourselves, that the one thing we want more than anything else is to experience the love of God.

Later in life, Augustine reflected on his mother\u2019s sincere prayers that night so many years before.\u00a0He was grateful \u2013 grateful that God had chosen not to answer them.\u00a0If God had said \u201cyes\u201d to her stated desire, then her real <\/em>desire for his spiritual awakening might never have been satisfied.\u00a0

He wrote this prayer of thanks:\u00a0\u201cYou, Lord, in the depth of your counsels, hearing the main point of her desire, regarded not what she then asked, so that you might make me what she always desired.\u201d

We may think we know exactly how God should guide us.\u00a0In our prayers we may even announce, \u201cNow, Lord, make sure you affirm this plan for my life.\u201d\u00a0

But God makes no such guarantees.

Augustine, the brilliant theologian, is Exhibit A that sometimes our unanswered prayers, as painful as they may seem, may actually represent God\u2019s \u201cyes\u201d to the prayers of the rest of the world.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here Each day this Lent we\u2019re looking at major \u201cturning points\u201d in Christian history \u2013 moments or seasons in which the story of God\u2019s people took an important and often unexpected turn. \u00a0 As Monica saw the sails\u00a0vanish over the horizon, her heart sank. If God had answered her prayers, that boat… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4474,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[689,179,879],"class_list":["post-4473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-conversion","tag-prayer","tag-unanswered-prayer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4475,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions\/4475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}