God's providence is an astonishing thing. On the one hand, it cannot be understood at all, and it may even seem that it is not worth trying, because the Lord Himself says, "My thoughts are not your thoughts" (Isa 55:8). On the other hand, the Lord says that "whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:35), and through the mouth of the apostle Paul the Spirit commands us: "Do not be foolish, but understand what the will of God is" (Eph 5:17).

So what should we do? How are we to grasp what, by definition, we cannot contain within ourselves? There is only one answer: call into yourself the Author of this design. And if He is in you, then the question of discerning God's will simply does not arise. Because the closer you are to God, the purer your heart is, the more you see God (see Matt 5:8), and the more your own desires turn out to be what God is in fact placing in your heart. It is immensely difficult to give yourself to God so completely that you are always led by the Spirit. Perhaps it is even painful: painful to one's own selfishness and vanity, which very much do not want to give up ground. But it is possible. It is possible to live a full life.

And today we see one such happy person, the deacon Philip. Philip is so open to the "breathings" of the Spirit that without hesitation he agrees to set out without knowing for what or where. And the Spirit rewards him fully for this, breaking the order that had existed until then and granting him a new gift: to "transmit" baptism with the Spirit.

It would hardly have occurred to Philip to go preach on an empty road, but the Angel of the Lord directly intervenes in the ministry of preaching and sends him there at the very moment when the Ethiopian official is about to pass along it. This encounter cannot be called ordinary, and not only because it happened through a direct angelic prompting. The encounter itself became the embodiment of the prophecy of Isaiah, the book the Ethiopian was reading.

That the foreigner was a Jew by faith is not surprising: by that time faith in the God of Israel had already gone beyond the boundaries of the Jewish people, so it is no wonder that the Ethiopian was reading the book of the prophet Isaiah. What is striking is the court official's humility, his readiness to listen to an interpretation from an ordinary-looking person he met on the road.

Immediately after Philip revealed to the Ethiopian eunuch, whose name remains unknown to us, the meaning of the prophecy, he wanted to be baptized. He did not need a long catechumenate, and not only because he himself was already ready for it.

After parting from Philip, the Ethiopian must have continued reading Isaiah, and a few turns of the scroll later he was going to read the prophecy that the Lord would accept even eunuchs, to whom He would give "an everlasting name that shall not be cut off" (Isa 56:5), and foreigners, "for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples" (Isa 56:7).

In the story of the conversion of the Ethiopian official, what seems important is how "independent" it is, how much God (and His servant Philip) respects this person's freedom. After all, no one forced the eunuch to read the prophecies about Christ; he himself began to seek the Lord, and he himself wanted to be baptized. Philip's function is reduced mainly to bearing witness to what these words of the prophet Isaiah, or all of Scripture, or his meeting with Jesus, mean in his life, and also to baptism, which can be administered only by someone who is already among Christ's disciples. Historically, Christians have not always known how to keep the balance between their calling to mission and respect for human freedom. Either they began baptizing others "with fire and sword," or they declared that "religion is everyone's personal affair" and stopped bearing witness to their faith. But, as we see from today's reading, these two components (the personal desire to meet God and the testimony of someone who already believes) work only together and bear the best fruit.