For a long time I pictured the saints as a different kind of person entirely. Born patient. Born pure. Somehow already finished before they ever started, so that reading about their lives felt less like an example to follow and more like a reminder of a gap I would never close.

Paul doesn’t leave room for that reading. Writing to Timothy, he calls himself the foremost of sinners, the one furthest out, and says that’s exactly why mercy was shown to him first, so that his own life could become an example to everyone who would come after him and wonder if there was room for them too.

That reorders the whole thing for me. The saints aren’t models because they started ahead of where I am. They’re models because they started where I actually am, and let grace do something with it. Augustine wasted years before he turned around. Peter denied Christ to his face and still became the rock the Church was built on. None of them were exceptions to ordinary struggle. They were proof of what ordinary struggle can become.

So this week, looking at the saints as models to follow, I’m trying to stop treating the distance between us as the point. It was never about matching where they ended up. It’s about letting the same mercy that caught them start working on whatever I’m still carrying.

Today’s Bible Study

James makes the same point about Elijah, of all people. Before praising what his prayer accomplished, James stops first to say plainly that Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. Not a different category of man. The same kind of man I am, prone to fear, prone to running when things got hard, who still prayed and was heard. The miracle was never that Elijah was built differently than the rest of us. It’s that God worked through someone this ordinary. That’s worth sitting with before asking God for anything today.

Recommended Reading

If this is new ground for you too, the Catechism has a short section worth reading, paragraphs 2013 and 2014, on the universal call to holiness. It’s addressed to all of us, not just the ones already on the calendar of saints.