By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The people I interviewed for my book, “Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith,” are like old friends. I like to look them up from time to time and take in their wisdom and their stories — funny, poignant, passionate. To make contact I don’t need to pick up the phone and give these old friends a call or a text message. All I have to do is wander into my old manuscript files and take a listen.

Here’s a post I wrote about one of my favorite interviewees, Geoff Machin. He had a long career as a neonatal pediatrician — a career long enough and gritty enough to learn that life can be brutal. As a physician, Geoff saw children born without a brain, without an esophagus, without hope for more than a few hours of life.

Those experiences could have made a cynic of Geoff. Instead he managed to find hope in the generosity he saw in ordinary human beings. Again and again throughout his life, he saw acts of selflessness that were clearly anti-biological, that were not done tit for tat (quid pro quo!). He saw people demonstrating that it is possible to overcome humanity’s Darwinian origins. Ordinary human kindness — that’s where Geoff is looking for God.

Read more about Geoff at “We Go Looking for God, When We Could Be Having a Beer.”

I’m reposting this little story today because, although it seems that right now the world in general and the US of A in particular are being overrun with self-serving people who see no point in looking out for other people or for the human social institutions that have been millennia in the making — despite all that, the impeachment hearings of November, 2019, have shown there are still plenty of folks who will stand up for the idea that, in the words of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, “Here, right matters.”