Although the last-ditch surgical procedure was technologically explainable, its success was without doubt a remarkable medical accomplishment. Whether by design or fortuity, in its aftermath I became inheritor and caretaker of a most unorthodox theory. The theory provides a plausible answer to the most perplexing and frequently asked theological question of our time. For who among us, scorched with great heat, has not raised his hands to God, who has power over the plagues, with palms up in prayerful entreaty . . . or fists clinched in angry blasphemy? The revelation didn't come by direct divine infusion, at least as that experience is popularly envisioned. It came instead by the willingness to consider the heretofore unthinkable. Those who are at ease hold calamity in contempt. But for those who despair of senseless hardship and tragedy, for those possessed by a gut-wrenching desire to know why God allows bad things to happen and why these bad things - as often as not - happen to good people, the theory offers admissible explication. If you know from whence you began and where you've been, you can ascertain where you are. And knowing where you are, you - unlike many others - have the power to choose where you are going. So do the right thing. Begin now to be the pilgrim, the seeker that you will be hereafter. Consider the evergreen laurel I call "the theory," its apical flower, which I call "the still point paradigm," and the paradigm's venerable antithesis, the fortified sanctuary the prophet Isaiah called a "palace of strangers." Then, having done all, whatever your conclusions, go in the strength that comes from knowing.
About the Author: James Earle was born and raised in Mississippi County, Arkansas, just north of Memphis on U.S. Highway 61. A graduate of the Blytheville High School Class of '57, he was there, by dumb luck perfectly positioned, in what has to have been the Golden Age of Adolescence. After graduating from college in 1961, he spent the next sixteen years in residential, farm, and commercial real estate finance and investment analysis. He was a faculty member at a regional state university from which he is currently retired - throughout the eventful '80s. His boyhood role model was screen actor John Wayne, but he has followed the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer since 1992. Neither a brilliant theologian like the quiet, intense Bonhoeffer nor a religious enthusiast like the modern Evangelicals, he considers himself what Darwinian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley referred to as a "Sunday scholar." His Christian persona is probably closer to that of the rough-hewn, pre-Pentecost Simon Peter. He lists among his favorite poetry Thomas Hardy's "The Impercipient" and has admired evangelist Billy Graham for decades. He and his wife of thirty-seven years, Anne, live in Willard, Missouri.