Trouble is, we never know when God is going to surprise us. Case in point: Jane Fonda.

From the 1960s on, no American may be more associated with the causes of the radical left than Fonda. During the Vietnam War, she trekked off to North Vietnam to cheer on the Communists (in one infamous moment, she mounted an anti-aircraft gun and pretended she was shooting down American pilots, whom she called "war criminals"). She only added to her reputation over the years. She claimed American prisoners of war lied about being tortured, announcing that we should all wish to live under communism, and bankrolled or crusaded for practically every favored cause of the left, especially those centerpieces of the sexual revolution, "abortion rights" and contraceptive handouts. To cap it all off, she married Ted Turner, who frequently (and publicly) announced his contempt for Christianity, a "religion for losers."

But something started to happen as Fonda approached her 60th birthday a couple years back. For all her causes, she recognized a spiritual void in her life. She talked with Christian friends, got into weekly Bible study, went to church — all in the process of developing a faith one friend calls "very real, very deep." By some accounts, Jane grew to the point where she refused a call to "meditate" at a recent environmental conference; instead, she urged participants to "pray to Jesus Christ."

Reports of these developments became public when Fonda and Turner announced a trial separation on Jan. 4 — spurred, it was said (though always by anonymous sources), by Ted’s unhappiness with Jane’s newfound faith. The story of her newfound Christianity quickly spread through the media, both alternative and mainstream. Some stories differed on the details, but none gave reason to question her sincerity.

Admittedly, some cautionary notes are in order. We don’t (and can’t) know the intimate details of what’s going on inside Jane Fonda. We don’t know where her journey will end — whether her faith will lead to a mature Christian worldview (which would entail, among other things, rejecting at least some of her longstanding causes, like abortion). It’s possible she may adopt a selective and self-constructed religion that isn’t really Christian at its core.

But we shouldn’t greet reports of Fonda’s conversion with cynical disbelief, as some people — still resentful of her past actions — are doing.

After all, the world is full of people who have journeyed as far as Fonda, or much farther, to find God. Take (to cite another high-profile case) Chuck Colson, former Nixon hatchetman, who ended up behind bars for his role in the 1970s Watergate scandal and there came to faith in Christ. Colson went on to found a ministry called called Prison Fellowship that works to promote Christian belief among convicts. That’s quite a switch for a man whose world, by his own testimony, used to be dominated by power politics.

And it’s not even the most dramatic tale. Many of the people Prison Fellowship works with have changed even more radically than Colson did. There are hardened criminals — murderers, rapists, drug dealers — whose lives have been genuinely changed by faith. God works such miracles every day. They just don’t get press coverage.

Next to those stories, Jane Fonda’s is hardly unbelievable.

This isn’t to say that it isn’t remarkable, in light of all the years she’s spent in a cultural environment hostile to Christianity. The most anti-Christian people you know (say, the head of the campus Abortion Rights League) probably aren’t nearly as steeped in their ways as the 62-year-old Fonda was — if only because they haven’t lived long enough yet.

That has implications for the rest of us. We may think that those people would never listen if we spoke about our faith, so there’s no point to trying. But we don’t know this — any more than the Christian friends of Jane Fonda knew it.

God’s call to believers is not to calculate the odds of witnessing successfully, but simply to witness faithfully. He does the actual work of conversion, and some time, when it looks most unlikely, He will surprise us. When that happens, it’s well worth the wait. Ask Jane’s friends.