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WE MADE an odd couple. When we first met, I was a punk in my mid-20s with bushy Art Garfunkel hair. Dr. Brand was a dignified, silver-haired surgeon characterized by proper British reserve. We went on to write three books together, and I now view the ten years I worked with him as an important chrysalis stage of my faith.

Wounded by the church, plagued by doubts, I had neither the confidence nor the ability to write about my own faith. Yet I could write with utter confidence and integrity about Dr. Brand's faith, and through that process his words and thoughts became mine too. As I helped him find his voice, he helped me find my faith.

In the movie Manhattan, Woody Allen tells a woman, "You're God's answer to Job." He explains that when Job complained about how awful the world was, God could say, "But I can still make one of these." Paul Brand served that role for me. As I struggled with the injustices of this world and the imponderables of theology, I could look to him as a shining example of what God had in mind with the human experiment.

Our conversations knew no limits. Dr. Brand quoted long passages from Shakespeare, exegeted Greek and Hebrew phrases from the Bible, discussed thrilling new discoveries about DNA, pointed out with childlike excitement birds and plants in India or the bayous of Louisiana where he practiced medicine. He had known and consulted with some of the great figures of the last century: Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi. He had received prestigious medical awards and been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

Dr. Brand said he felt guilty because he merely answered my questions and a few years later a book would emerge. I responded that all I did was ask questions, research, and write up the answers, whereas he had spent a lifetime serving leprosy patients, some of the lowliest people on the planet.

The conversations that stand out sharpest to me now are those in which he told of his patients, "nobodies," many of them from the Untouchable caste. When he began his pioneering work, he was the only orthopedic surgeon in the world working among 15 million victims of leprosy. He and his wife, Margaret, also a physician, performed several dozen surgical procedures on some of these patients, transforming rigid claws into usable hands through tendon transfers, remaking feet, preventing blindness, transplanting eyebrows, and fashioning new noses.

He told me of his patients' family histories, the rejection they had experienced as the disease manifested itself, the trial-and-error treatments they underwent as doctor and patient experimented together. Almost always his eyes would moisten and he would wipe away tears as he recalled their suffering. To him these people were not nobodies. They were made in the image of God, and he devoted his life to restoring that image, badly marred by disease.

I often felt like James Boswell, who tailed the great man Samuel Johnson and loyally recorded every morsel of wisdom that fell from his lips. Brand's daughter Pauline once thanked me for bringing some order to "the happy jumble of my father's life and thoughts." Little did she know the role her father played in bringing some order to the unhappy jumble of my own life. As I compare the person I was in 1975, on our first meeting, and the person I am now, I realize that seismic changes have occurred within me, with Dr. Brand responsible for many of those tremors.

Deprived of my own father in infancy, I received as an adult from Dr. Brand much that I had missed. He helped set my course in outlook, spirit, and ideals. I look at the natural world, and environmental issues, largely through his eyes. From him I also have gained assurance that the Christian life I had heard in theory can actually work out in practice. He proved it is possible to achieve success without forfeiting humility, to serve others sacrificially and yet emerge with joy and contentment.

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11