Acts 26:17-18 "I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’" Paul is recounting his conversion experience to King Agrippa. Here he is telling the king what Jesus said to him and revealing the mission he has been given by Christ.

Paul was sent particularly to the Gentiles, even though he had been such a staunch Jew prior to his conversion and would not have had much time for the Gentiles, nor many good feelings towards them. It seems to me that God often takes the things we are most resistant to, and puts them front and center in our lives. Paul's incredible success in converting the Gentiles is also, I think, an example of how God takes what can be our greatest shortcomings or mistakes, and makes them our greatest strengths if we let Him.

God blessed Saint Paul with great intelligence and a strong and persuasive personality. Being a devout Jew, Paul used these personal strengths in teaching and defending his faith. All well and good so far, but when something came along that challenged Paul's understanding of that faith, those personality traits kept him from humbly considering this new teaching, and instead led him to pridefully and murderously defend the Jewish faith from what he saw as a threat. Paul's natural intelligence and persuasive abilities brought him to a place of pride in which he could not even consider that he might be wrong, and therefore could not tolerate anyone speaking or even living in a way that suggested he was. Paul's natural strengths thus led him to pride and stubbornness, which in turn led him to sin, including even murder, all while being blind to his wrongdoing, until, that is, God blinded him with His light!

After his conversion, Paul still had the same traits, but he now knew how he should be employing them. This turnaround led Paul to become the greatest evangelist the Church has ever known. Christianity would not have gotten off the ground the way it did without St. Paul's unabashed, heartfelt, determined, and sometimes even brash style of preaching. The very same traits that had led him to great sin now allowed him to spread the Word wherever God led him, and helped him through setbacks, attacks, imprisonments, derision, and rejection practically everywhere he went. God had taken Paul's sinful tendencies and reoriented them, allowing Paul to use his natural gifts to build God's Kingdom among the Gentiles, who needed Paul's assertive personality to "break through" their own firmly held beliefs and lack of understanding. Paul's history, at the same time, afforded him a unique insight into how sin can get a hold of us, and how people can be entirely on the wrong track without even realizing it, a useful understanding when preaching the completely new Gospel he was tasked with spreading.

There are similar examples in the lives of many other saints, like Saint Augustine and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, both of whom let their talents and yearnings lead them astray before becoming focused on God. Once they allowed themselves to be reoriented, however, they gifted the world with incredible teachings and exemplary lives, things that never would have been fully developed but for their earlier mistakes. There are also examples of saints with more mundane shortcomings, and even disabilities, that God turned to His purposes. I am thinking of someone like Saint André Bessette, who was frail, sickly, and lacking in education, yet as a lowly doorman became an exemplary minister of hospitality and love.

While we all have personality traits, shortcomings, and limitations that we struggle against, we can take comfort that God will help us reorient that struggle if we let Him. He gave us these traits for a reason, there is something we are supposed to do with them or make of them. If we stop letting them lead us astray or into despair, and instead dedicate them to God, He will do amazing things with them and us!