What if the chapter of your life you’re most ashamed of is carrying value you’ve never learned how to deploy?
We tend to treat our past like a liability: mistakes to hide, failures to forget, seasons we wish had never happened. But Paul’s story challenges that instinct.
Before he became the missionary, theologian, church planter, and writer whose words would shape generations, he was Saul, a man known for persecuting the very people he would later serve. Yet something remarkable happened on the road to Damascus.
Paul didn’t become a completely different man.
The intensity remained, the conviction remained, the discipline remained, the intellectual depth remained.
What changed was the direction.
And perhaps that is the deeper lesson: transformation doesn’t always mean becoming someone new. Sometimes, it means taking what already exists within you and putting it to work for a different purpose.
The asset register
Consider what was already on the books before the transformation:
Training: Saul studied under Gamaliel, one of the most respected teachers of his era. That is not a footnote. That is the theological depth that later allowed Paul to argue Scripture with the most educated men in the Mediterranean and hold his ground.
Legal status: Roman citizenship gave him the right to travel, the right to appeal, and the right to a hearing that non-citizens simply did not get. Paul invoked it more than once. In modern terms: a passport that opened borders and a legal protection that kept him alive long enough to write.
A trade: He made tents. This matters more than we usually acknowledge. Paul largely funded his own mission, which meant he never had to soften a message to keep a patron comfortable. Financial independence bought him message independence.
Network and cultural fluency: He knew the institutions, the arguments, the customs and the objections, because he had lived inside them. The Damascus road deleted none of this. It redirected it. God changed his direction, not his capacity.
Now say it in financial language
For most people, the largest asset they will ever own is not property or a portfolio. It is human capital, the present value of everything they can earn and produce across a working life. Early in a career, it dwarfs everything else on the personal balance sheet. Every skill, credential, relationship and hard-won piece of judgement sits inside it.
Here is where we make the error.
We treat difficult chapters as impairments and write them down to zero. Failed business: written off. Career we walked away from: written off. Season we are ashamed of: written off entirely.
But an impairment is an accounting judgement, not a fact about the asset. Sometimes the asset is still generating. We have simply stopped measuring it.
Good capital allocators understand this instinctively. The best turnarounds rarely gut a business. They re-point it. Same plant, same people, same distribution network, new thesis. The value was never absent. It was misdirected.
The founder who has been through insolvency prices risk differently for the rest of their life. The executive who owned a costly mistake reads early warning signals that a spotless CV never learned to see. The investor who sat through a real drawdown, not a chart of one, the actual thing, with actual money, carries a calibrated risk tolerance you cannot buy from a questionnaire.
That is expensive information. Most people paid full price for it and then refuse to use it.
The diaspora version of this
For anyone building across borders, this is not a metaphor. It is Tuesday.
The chartered accountant from Lagos whose qualification is not recognised in Houston. The UK-trained nurse re-sitting exams in Toronto. The engineer with fifteen years of infrastructure delivery whose CV reads as “no local experience” to an applicant tracking system.
The market has not destroyed that capital. It has mispriced it, because the recognition infrastructure has not caught up.
Mispricing and worthlessness are entirely different things. One is a gap you can close, through bridging qualifications, through building where your dual fluency is genuinely scarce, through serving the corridor between two economies that very few people understand from both sides. The other is a story you tell yourself at 2 am
.
Paul’s Roman citizenship was, in the end, a cross-border advantage he did not create and did not waste. Most of us are carrying something similar. Most of us have never audited it.
The honest part
There is a version of this message that curdles into something dishonest, so let me be direct.
Saul’s record was not neutral. He stood by at a stoning. He hunted people down. Redemption does not retroactively make harm useful, and those he harmed did not get their outcomes reversed because his skills were later redeployed. His own letters keep returning to this. He never presents it as a strategic detour.
So the lesson is not “everything happens for a reason.” It is narrower and far more useful: capability built in the wrong direction is still capability, and refusing to name the wrong direction is precisely what keeps it from being redeemed.
Own the record. Redeploy the capacity. Two separate acts. Skipping the first corrupts the second.
That distinction matters in leadership as much as in faith. The leaders people genuinely trust are not the ones with unbroken records. They are the ones who can state plainly what went wrong, what they did, and what they built afterwards, without flinching and without spin.
The question
Your history almost certainly contains chapters you would write differently. That is a universal condition, not a personal defect.
But before you write another one off, run the audit:
- What did that season teach me that I could not have learned faster or cheaper anywhere else?
- Which of those skills transfer, and to what?
- What am I still carrying at zero that is quietly worth something?
Transformation does not always mean becoming an entirely different person. Sometimes it means allowing everything you have learned, including from your darkest seasons, to be pointed somewhere better.
The Paul the world celebrates was built on the Saul history overlooks. The foundation mattered as much as the turning.
So: what is on your balance sheet that you wrote off too early?
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” — Romans 8:28 (KJV)
The more I learn, the more I discover how little I know. Until the next issue, Coach MO.
