But, inexplicably, he walked away. He moved to a small cabin in the wilds of Nebraska, growing increasingly disenchanted with modernity and progress. Some say it was rooted in a CIA mind control experiment he participated in while a student. But for whatever reason, he began building bombs and sending them to corporate heads and university professors. And one of them ended up in the office of David Gelertner, a computer science professor at Yale University.

In his book, Surviving the Unabomber, Gelertner described his recovery from the bomb that took the sight of one of his eyes and crippled a hand. It was maddeningly slow, he said, until one October day he sat in his living room listening to a Beethoven quartet:

"The explosion stopped me dead with a staggering jolt. But such an event is not all bad. It makes you face the fact that life is short, things change, you die. As I sit in the dark living room that October, it finally dawns on me that I have to turn the vessel around right now or die unhappy. I'd imagined that when the time came I could pull off a supple turn like a stunt pilot, but in fact as you get a family and build a career, your life grows into an aircraft carrier, and turning it becomes steadily harder. Coming to a dead halt may be a necessary part of making the turn."

His life isn't the only one that has come to a dead halt. We've all experience the sensation at one time or another. We've faced economic uncertainty and loved ones who have Alzheimers; we've been searching for steady work without success and been laid up in the hospital; we know tragedy, because no one is immune from sickness and death and separation.

From the pages of the Jewish scriptures comes a story that traverses four millennia. It was first written down in the time of David, more than a thousand years before Jesus. The story begins by introducing the main character, Job, "blame-less and upright, who feared God and turned away from evil." But in six sentences, his world turns upside down. He loses his family, his possessions, and everyone around him advises him to abandon his faith as well. And for the rest of the book, Job argues with God-not unlike the rabbi of some years ago who wrote the book, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

Of course, every religious tradition has at-tempted a response to this very human query. Because bad things have a way of working out for the good. "Why was my son in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001?" a parent asked.

The televangelist responds, "For some reason, God just meant for those people to be in those buildings so that God could teach all of us a les-son." Next question, please. Others say bad things happen because the future reward will be so great-"pie in the sky when you die". But of-ten we just blame the victim; if something bad happens, surely they must have done some-thing to deserve it. Just listen to the things we say to people enduring a tragedy: "Don't take it so hard … heaven must have needed another angel … God won't give you more than you can bear." Even Job's friends used these lines on their suffering homeboy.

The answer that finally came to Job was no answer. We don't know why people do such terri-ble things in this life. We don't know why peo-ple experience tragedy. We don't know. But what we can learn is when our lives turn upside down, we can do three things--that I read many years ago:

1. Don't blame yourself. Don't allow your self to be poisoned by guilt or self-hatred. Don't beat up on yourself even if you made some mistakes that have brought you to the place where you are today.

2. Let your pain be your pain. Job didn't deny his suffering because he knew that if you want healing, you first have to acknowledge your pain. So express your feelings to someone who will listen with patience and love.

3. Open yourself to change. Job received an answer, but it wasn't the answer he expected to hear. When our worlds are shattering, the first thing we want to do is to put the pieces back together, to make things the way they were before. But that old world is no more. We are living in a new universe with which we have to come to terms.

I hope life is good for you this fall. But we've had enough experience to know that it will not always be this way. Why? We don't have the answers. But what we do have is a presence. Because the One who spread Orion across the night skies, says old Job, is the same God who loves us. And sometimes, for the unanswerable questions of life, this is enough.