Grant Batchelder

Dear friends in Christ,

(Acts 22:17–29)

There are a lot of tensions in Paul’s story.

He was a Jew and a Roman citizen. He had persecuted the followers of Jesus and would become one of Christianity’s greatest apostles. He belonged to the world into which he was sent, but after encountering Christ, he could no longer simply be part of it in the same way.

And God used all of it.

In today’s reading, Paul does not hide his past. When Jesus tells him to leave Jerusalem, Paul responds by recalling it: “I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you.” He even admits that when Stephen was killed, he stood by approving.

Jesus does not tell Paul that none of that matters anymore. He tells him, “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.”

Then, only a few verses later, Paul invokes another part of who he is: “I was born a citizen.”

Paul could cross boundaries because he had been standing on more than one side of them. He understood the people and institutions around him because they were part of his own story. Even his sinful past gave him knowledge of the world he was now called to change.

I wonder if Christians are called to live in these borderlands too. Not fully removed from the world, nor fully defined by it, but standing within it while belonging to something beyond it.

We belong to God, but we are also citizens, neighbors, workers, parents, teachers, students, and members of communities and institutions. We inherit their histories, including their sins, and participate in systems that do not always reflect the Kingdom of God. We cannot pretend we stand outside them.

But perhaps that is precisely where God can use us.

Paul did not have to erase who he had been before God could send him. God used the whole person, including his history and the different worlds he inhabited, to send him somewhere others struggled to go.

What borders do you inhabit, and how might God use your place within them to reach across?

If this idea of living between worlds speaks to you, I also recommend Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which has deeply shaped how many of us think about identity, boundaries, and what can happen in the spaces between them.

In Christ,

—Grant