A powerful general, healed of his disease, asks to carry home two mule-loads of foreign soil. The request sounds strange until you see what it means. He is planting a piece of a new allegiance inside the old country that owns him. Conversion begins small. It starts as a stubborn patch of ground a man refuses to surrender.
He cannot yet abandon his whole world, so he carves out a territory he can defend. Deep change rarely arrives as one clean break. It comes as a claimed foothold that slowly spreads outward. Set aside one plot of earth for what is highest, and stand on it. From that first honest ground the rest of a life can be rebuilt.