Elephant in the courtroom

I had a rendezvous with a college friend I haven't seen in 35 years. I picked him out in a crowd on a city common; the eyes don't change.

After a shaky personal start in college, he went on to work his way through law school, became a captain in the army, went into private practice, then worked as a trial attorney in both the criminal justice division and the public defender's office, then as an enforcer of his state's environmental protection laws, moving on to be the state's first Prosecutor of insurance fraud, then Inspector General, then First Assistant Attorney General. Now he's a judge, and well respected for his integrity and courage.

All this I learned snooping on the internet; he is much too modest in person. And anyway, you don't put on airs with someone you knew when you were 19.

He has no interest in God but is a good listener. Toward the end of the meal I hazarded a change of subject: "You're all about evidence," I said. I was leading the witness to a consideration of the elephant-in-the-room evidence that persuaded me, soon after our college parting, about the existence of God --- the Romans 7 conundrum that we don't do what we want to do. He disclosed the same personal dilemma but still wasn't biting.

It was finally time to say goodbye, and on the way home I thought about what I had gleaned about his courtroom: compassion for the underdog and intolerance for fat-cat exploiters, his love of the law and hatred of lawbreaking. I had given him a Bible over dinner, and who knows, maybe he'll open it --- maybe see in his own internal wiring another evidence of God that demands a verdict.