In my country, England, we play a game called "bowls." When you're too old to run around the block or play tennis or racquetball, you can still go to these lovely green lawns and bowl a little ball called a jack. You send it as far and as straight as you can. Then you take a big bowling ball with a spot on it. You aim the big ball at the little jack. The problem is there's a bias inside the big ball. However straight you aim it, it always goes off-key to the right or to the left. So the game isn't quite so simple as you think.

Nor is the game of life. No matter how hard you aim a child at a target--the target being to do right, to think right, to be right--there is a bias within the human heart that takes it off-key. The good things we want to do, we don't. And we do the things that we don't want to do, as the Anglican prayer book has it. There is no health in us.