As a west Texan, Don Evans did what came naturally in a storm: he joined a Bible study group. He coaxed his friend George Bush to come along. The program was called Community Bible Study—started ironically in the Washington, D.C., area in 1975 by a group of suburban women. By the time it got to Midland, Texas, it was a spiritual boot camp; an intensive, year-long study of a single Book of the New Testament, each week a new chapter with detailed reading and discussion in a group of ten men.

For two years Bush and Evans and their partners read the clear writings of the Gentile physician Luke—Acts and then his Gospel. Two themes stood out, one spiritual, one more political: Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, and the founding of the church. Bush, who cares little for the abstract and a great deal for people, responded to the conversion story. He liked the idea of knowing Jesus as a friend.

The Bible study was the turning point for the future president. It gave him, for the first time, an intellectual focus. Here was the product of elite secular education—Andover, Yale, and Harvard—who, for the first time, was reading a book line by line with rapt attention. A jogger and a marathoner for years, Bush found in Bible study an equivalent mental and spiritual discipline.