When WORLD magazine was still a tender four-year-old, and not the mature 10-year-old journal we have just become, a veteran Christian publisher told me it would take a miracle for our fledgling effort to succeed. After running our business plan through their computers, he and his chief financial officer told me-with sincere regrets-that ours was an "Impossible Publishing Formula." Those scary words were scrawled across the manila folder he handed back to me.

My lament in this space two weeks ago shouldn't be taken out of context. I noted how we're passing through still another election cycle in the United States without a serious representative of evangelical thought and action stepping forward as a candidate for president. But we shouldn't kid ourselves. The reason we have such a shortage of candidates for president who know how to apply biblical thinking to all of life is that we have an equally serious shortage in just about every other vocation.

The happy news this past week about Charles and Anna Stanley, and their determination to seek reconciliation in their marriage, calls to mind our own need for reconciliation with a few of our readers.