Listening to a student read the Scripture in seminary chapel, Joseph Sittler, now blind, heard something he'd never heard before. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me."

"The text does not speak," said Sittler, "of the valley of death but the valley of the shadow of death. There is a difference. ... The wonderful truth ... is that God is with us now. It is not simply that God will be with us in the experience of death itself; it is that God will walk with us through all of life, a life over which death sometimes casts its shadow."