I am now an emergency physician and the medical director of a busy trauma center in western Colorado. To this day I shake my head in wonder when I look back upon the series of events that has driven me inexorably to this point. I see now that it all began the night when my life was a certain and violent death. And I also see that I have been shepherded to this place in my life for a reason. Now I speak with angels all the time.
Those who assent to higher laws enter a new sphere of life marked by utter unpredictability, a way of being in which one becomes, if and when one remains alerts, a living weather vane responding minute-by-minute to the breath of the Spirit. . . As soon as we turn, even for a moment, to a deeper understanding of what life demands, of what is asked of us as beings born of earth and heaven, as long as we move, if only for a moment, from the realms of self-calming, self-feeding, and self-adoring into the realm of sacrifice and work for love of God and neighbor, we immediately enter, in potentia, the field of holy folly. Whether this potential is actualized is a decision not ours to make ("not my will, by Thy will be done"). Our job is to listen to the call: that is enough.