When I was in elementary school, I bought one of those rock tumbling kits from a gift shop at the Museum of Science. You might be able to picture it: it’s a plastic tube that’s attached to a motor that spins it around, and you put in some of these dull and boring rocks and this powder and some water, and you plug it in. We put ours down in the basement, because it was really loud as it spun around and around and the rocks banged around inside. After some amount of time—I don’t even know how long—you opened it up and looked inside, and rinsed off the stones, and they’d turned from dull, jagged rocks into smooth, beautiful gems.

This Monday, in our church calendar, is the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. (That may seem like it has nothing to do with rock tumblers.) You may remember the famous story of the conversion of Paul; Paul, who’d been persecuting and hunting out the early Christians, is riding down the road to Damascus to look for even more of them, and suddenly there’s a bright light, and he falls from his horse, and the voice of God speaks to him out of the heavens—and he’s suddenly, in that instance, converted, and becomes the greatest apostle in the early church.

Some people have a conversion story like Paul. Many more have a conversion like a rock tumbler: all of us, jammed together in the church or in our households or in our families, not suddenly blinded by a flash of light that changes our lives but slowly rolling and rolling, smoothing one another out and polishing one another.

You can come up with all sorts of parts of this extended metaphor. Maybe we’re the stones, and the church is the tumbler, and the Holy Spirit is the powder, the soapy liquid that helps polish us—whatever it is! But I think it’s good to remember, at the beginning of a new year, at the end of a long and difficult year—that it’s difficult times that grind us down, that polish us, that turn us into the people we were meant to be. It’s not the easiest moments of life, the ones that we enjoy most, that turn us into the people we are. It’s the crises. It’s the difficulties. It’s the struggle. And it’s the way we bump up against one another in those moments, whether in conflict or in love.

It is by the power of the Holy Spirit, it is by the grace of God that these moments turn us into the people we really were underneath. So I pray, this year, as we begin 2021, as we head toward Lent, that you may find the grace and the strength to become the person you were meant to be, in community with one another—in your family, in your church, in our world.