Technology update: I can now take a color photograph, run it through a scanner which digitizes it, and display it on my computer screen. Then I can make adjustments to my heart's content, blotting out blemishes, lightening shadows, putting a halo around my head, etc.

Nifty stuff, huh? Sort of like a White House press release or a conversation with your mother-in-law. Except, well, my computer display is black-and-white, so I don't get the full impact of the colors. And the resolution of my screen is only about a tenth that of the original photo. And it's often fuzzy around the edges. I could tinker with the number of gray-scale layers: The fewer the grays, the sharper the image, but the less detail is possible. It's a trade-off: clarity vs. reality.

Have you ever been hurt or angry? Of course. Who hasn't felt the sting of injustice and railed outwardly (or inwardly) at the sheer unfairness of it all? In such times we want our justice swift, direct and to the point. Nothing fuzzy about it at all: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Hollywood justice: The guy gets his girl, the Mountie gets his man, the cowboy gets his horse. Precise, neat, orderly, gift-wrapped and delivered straight to your doorstep with the morning paper and a complimentary cup of coffee.

But it ain't necessarily so.

Some of the best things in life - sex, babies and sloppy joes, for instance - have this way of getting real messy. Ditto democracy, a walk in the rain or hot fudge anything. God's creation is infinitely more partial to Brownian motion and fractals than to the comfortable symmetries of straight and party lines.

Remember your high school physics class? Neither do I. I only understood about 2 of every 3,000 words the teacher said, but there was one item I could handle well: plug-in formulas. I never did grasp how come or wherefore, but give me two legs of "a + b = c" and I was master of the third. I might have chosen the wrong formula for the problem ("Cleveland" does not answer "E = ?c2"), but my manipulation of data was impeccable.

This is a problem we have with justice: We may toss around facts and figures with profound dexterity while applying the wrong formula to the case at hand.

Poor managers love to have everything spelled out - every conceivable situation, every possible combination, every reward and every punishment to the nth jot and tittle. Book, chapter and verse; month, day and nanosecond. Get it all down in black and white: An eye for an eye, etc. It absolves them from responsibility, from complicity, from thinking. It replaces communication and sharing with covering one's behind. Check it out: The longer the handbook, the worse the working conditions.

This is bureaucracy: The dehumanization of our dealings with one another, the transformation from servant to manager.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth - a fair and perfect solution, but only to the problem of creating a blind world where no one can eat. Justice in the real world is not so neat.

And neither is grace.

Creator God gave us a world of blue skies, green grass, red sunsets and rainbows that just don't know when to quit. To get it all down in black and white is to miss the best parts.