Long before Frederick Buechner was a well-known Christian author and Presbyterian minister, as a young man he sat in the dead of winter in Army fatigues somewhere near Anniston, Alabama, eating supper out of a mess kit. The infantry training battalion that he had been assigned to was on bivouac. There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down.

He was still hungry when he finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going t…