My hands were shaky a quarter-century ago as I carried the heavy box from the front door of our house into my study. Inside were my author’s copies of Witness to Hope, the first volume of my biography of Pope John Paul II, and my mind was racing: Did the editors catch the last corrections I sent? Did that scarifying misnumbering of the endnotes in one chapter get sorted out? Are there uncaught typos that made a mess of things? Steadying myself to open the box without cutting into the beautiful dust covers of a work that had absorbed three years of my life, a gratitude-inducing thought occurred: a lot of what had happened over the past forty-eight years had been a preparation for this moment. So after a prayer of thanks that calmed my nerves, I managed to get the box open without damaging any of its contents.
