God Loves UPS

Proof that God can (and does) work miracles of conversion through brown trucks

IN EARLY 1995, a young Catholic law student at Regent University (a flagship Evangelical Protestant law school founded by Pat Robertson) wrote me an email. I’ll call him Greg. His message was earnest and a little shaken. After his Evangelical classmates discovered he was Catholic, they launched what he called a “full-court press” to convince him to leave the Church, “get saved,” and recast himself as a “Bible Christian.”

He explained that reading my recently published book Surprised by Truth: 11 Converts Give the Biblical and Historical Reasons for Becoming Catholic had been an invigorating spiritual boost, giving him some much-needed clarity and resolve he needed to withstand the barrage.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll understand why it helped him. Surprised by Truth—the first of four volumes in my “Surprised By” series—is a collection of powerful and deeply personal accounts from 11 former Evangelicals, Calvinists, Lutherans, Baptists, and others who describe in their own words the difficult doctrinal questions and objections they struggled through that eventually drew them into the Catholic Church.

The stories are raw, honest, rooted in Scripture and reason, and they have by God’s grace guided countless readers wrestling with similar questions into or back into the Catholic Church. The miracles of conversion I’ve personally witnessed through the Surprised by Truth books are truly awe-inspiring.

Something about Greg’s message stayed with me. On impulse, I wrote back offering to send him a full case of the books at my own expense if he would just hand them out to his classmates and professors, especially those most determined to talk him out of the Catholic Faith. I added that I’d even pay the more expensive UPS shipping charges to get them to him quickly.

He accepted immediately. “What the heck,” he said. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” That was good enough for me. The next day I shipped a case of forty-four copies and said a short prayer that they might reach the right eyes and ears. After that, life carried on. He never wrote again, and the incident faded into the background of my memory.

Seventeen years later, that forgotten decision came back in a way I never expected.

I was at a parish event signing books when a smiling woman approached the table, pointed at a stack of Surprised by Truth, and said, “That book brought me into the Catholic Church.”

I asked her how it happened. Her answer stopped me cold.

She had been a law student at Regent University in the mid-90s.

One day, she explained, a Catholic classmate walked into class carrying a box of books (44 copies of Surprised by Truth, don’t ya know) and handed out copies to everyone, including the professor. She admitted she was more amused than anything else.

Evangelicals like herself becoming Catholic?

Please.

She couldn’t imagine it. But eventually, she said, she got around to reading the book (“Once I started,” she earnestly assured me, eyes wide, “I just couldn’t put it down”), and what she discovered forced her to rethink everything she assumed about Catholic teaching.

In that moment, standing at the book table, that forgotten case of books I had shipped to Greg sprang back into memory. God had quietly used something as ordinary as one student’s courage to change a life. Her story alone would have been enough to keep me grateful for years.

But there was yet another surprise ahead.

A few summers later, I was speaking at Franciscan University of Steubenville’s annual “Defending the Faith” conference, held in the large fieldhouse that seats around fifteen hundred people. Most summers it was packed to capacity. For about twenty-five years I taught apologetics there, grateful for the privilege and well aware that I was part of a long line of others who had served before me.

During one of my presentations I told the story of Greg, the Regent classroom, and the woman who had converted after reading the book. The crowd loved it. When the session ended, a man wove through the crowd and approached me with the look of someone carrying a missing piece of the puzzle.

We shook hands. “There’s more to that story than you realize,” he said, grinning.

“Oh really?” I replied, expectantly. “Tell me more.” I anticipated a small detail or two. I was not prepared for the avalanche of serendipity that followed.

He told me, with unmistakable excitement, that he too had been in that very same Regent law course. Until the day Greg, “that Catholic guy,” as he put it, nonchalantly carried the box of books into class, he had never taken the Catholic Church seriously. As a Protestant, he hadn’t even given it a second thought.

“But that day, and those books, changed everything,” he said, “and not just for me.”

He read the copy he received, and that began his own path toward the Church. Then he added, almost casually, “And I know at least two others from that class who became Catholic because of it.”

“What is going on here?” I asked myself incredulously. I stared at him, trying to absorb what he had just said. I had assumed the fruit of that forgotten gesture stopped with that one woman. This amazing story was clearly not the result of mere serendipity; it was a full-blown case of God’s loving providence in action.

But wait. There’s more. He wasn’t finished unfolding the story.

Grinning even more broadly, he pointed across the crowded fieldhouse toward a man dressed in black way in the back of the room. “See that priest over there standing by the door?”

“Yes,” I said, my eyes widening in amazement as I followed his line of sight.

“He too was in that same class! Back then he was a Protestant studying to be a lawyer. And like the rest of us, the Catholic guy gave him a copy of Surprised by Truth. And look what happened!”

“No way!” I thought to myself, stunned. My jaw nearly hit the floor. A future Catholic priest had been sitting in that same classroom, reading the very book from the very box Greg carried in twenty years earlier?

What do you even do with a moment like that?

All I could do was stand there and laugh-cry, stunned once again at how God works in mysterious ways; and yes, when He feels like it, through brown delivery trucks.

It reminded me of tossing the proverbial message in a bottle into the Pacific Ocean—never expecting to ever see it again—and then, literally decades later, discovering that the same bottle had washed up on the Atlantic shore and been opened by people I never knew existed.

That taught me something essential about God’s grace. You never know what He may choose to do with the kindness you offer someone, however seemingly random or spur-of-the-moment.

Seriously. You will never know the quiet path that a simple, heartfelt act of speaking the truth in love can take, or how far its reach will extend. Even if it’s just handing someone a good Catholic book, or texting someone a link to a Catholic radio show. What might seem small and insignificant to you may well be, in God’s mighty and mysterious providence, something life-changing for someone else, from here to eternity.

If ever I needed proof that God still works miracles (even through UPS) and that nothing we offer to Him in prayerful trust is wasted, this was it.

“Practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another. As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Pet 4:9–10, RSV-2CE).

Copyright © 2025 Patrick Madrid. All rights reserved. All text, images, and other original content are the property of the author.

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