Acts 22:10-27

¹⁰Then I said, ‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ That boss said, ‘Get up and go into Damascus. A man there will tell you everything that I want you to do.’

¹¹That light was so bright it made me blind. I could not see, so the men with me held my hand and took me into Damascus.

¹²A man called Ananias lived in that town. He respected God, and he properly followed our Jewish laws. All the Jews living in Damascus said he was a good man.

¹³He came to me and stood beside me, and he said to me, ‘My friend Saul, you can see again now.’ Then I could see again. I looked up and saw him standing there beside me.

¹⁴Then he said, ‘The God that we respect, and the one our grand-fathers respected, he picked you, and he will show you everything he wants you to do. You will see that properly good man, and you will hear him talking to you.

¹⁵He wants you to tell everyone everywhere that you saw him and heard him.

¹⁶So now you can stop waiting. Stand up, and pray to our leader, Jesus, and ask God not to punish you for all the bad things you did. After that I will baptise you.’ That’s what Ananias said to me.”

¹⁷Paul kept talking to that mob. He said, “After that I went back to Jerusalem. One day I went to God’s ceremony house. While I was praying there, I had like a dream.

¹⁸I saw our leader, Jesus, and he was talking to me. He said, ‘Don’t stay here. Leave Jerusalem now. The people here will not believe anything you tell them about me.’

¹⁹I said to him, ‘But Sir, they know me. They know I went to a lot of our meeting houses looking for people that believe in you. I grabbed anyone that believed in you and I beat them up and put them in jail.

²⁰The people here know about Stephen too. He told people about you, and they killed him. And I stood there watching them kill him, and I agreed with them. I even looked after the coats of the men that were killing him. So I reckon these Jerusalem people will not make trouble for me.’

²¹But Jesus said to me, ‘No, don’t stay here. Leave Jerusalem. You see, I’m sending you a long way from here. I’m sending you to people that are not Jews.’”

²²The mob listened quietly to Paul until he said that. You see, they didn’t like people that were not Jews, so they got very angry with Paul and they started shouting, “Kill him. Don’t let this kind of man stay alive on this earth.”

²³The mob kept on shouting, “Kill him.” And they took off their coats, and they threw dust into the air, to show that they were very angry.

²⁴So the boss told his soldiers, “Take Paul into your big house and hit him with a whip so he will tell us why that mob are shouting at him.” The soldiers took Paul into their house,

²⁵then they stretched his arms out and tied them so that they could whip his back. But Paul talked to the boss of the soldiers that was standing there. He said, “Wait. I’m a Jew, but I’m a Roman too. My name is in the book in a Roman office. But you didn’t try me in a court, and no judge said that I’m guilty, so if you whip me you will be breaking the Roman law.”

²⁶That boss heard Paul’s words, then he went to the big boss and told him about Paul. He said, “This man is not just a Jew, he is a Roman too. Do you really want us to whip him?”

²⁷The big boss heard that story and he was shocked. He went to Paul and said, “Tell me, are you really a Roman?” Paul said, “Yes, I am.”