Acts 13:1-12. Back in Antioch, Barnabas and Saul are praying with other prophets and teachers when the Holy Spirit tells the group that Barnabas and Saul are to be set aside for a mission. The group lays hands on the two and sends them off. Barnabas and Saul bring John to assist them and head to Seleucia and from there to Cyprus, proclaiming the word of God in the synagogues. In Paphos, the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, summons Barnabas and Saul (who we are now told is also called Paul) to hear what they are preaching. A certain Jewish false prophet magician named Bar-Jesus or Elymas was with Sergius, and opposes the visit from Barnabas and Saul, for he was "seeking to turn away the proconsul from the faith." Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, chastises Elymas strongly, calling him a son of the devil and an enemy of righteousness, full of deceit and villainy. He asks Elias "Will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? " and then tells him that he shall be blind for a time as the hand of the Lord will come upon him. Immediately mist and darkness fall upon Elias and he casts about for people to lead him by the hand. "Then the proconsul believed, when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord."

As I have felt called to evangelize more over the last few years, I have noticed more and more people like Elymas. Someone seems interested in the faith, if even only slightly, but then someone close to them tries to convince them not to talk to me, or someone close to me tries to convince me I am talking about religion too much. It is interesting that Elymas is a Jew. The Jews can either see their faith as being fulfilled or threatened by Christianity, thus being more likely to be converted by, or more likely to be opposed to, this new teaching. Sergius is intelligent and curious, open to hearing what Paul and Barnabas have to say, but Elymas sees these two as a threat. I find I often get the most pushback in my evangelization efforts from fellow Catholics. I think this is a problem similar to Elymas'.

God is in the process of rebuilding His Church, that is very clear to me. There is an awful lot of mistaken belief, misguided behavior, and even downright sin and corruption that has to be countered and brought into the light for the rebuilding to continue. Many have their identities as Catholics tied up in the ways that are being corrected - they have been "making crooked the straight ways paths of the Lord", as Paul accuses Elymas of doing. These Catholics have the same choice that the Jews had - they can see what is happening as a necessary and beautiful correction, a fulfillment of God's promise to make His paths straight, or they can see it as a threat to their own comfortable Catholicism (and Catholicism was never meant to be comfortable!. How they view it will determine how they react to people like Paul and Barnabas trying to evangelize.