Kerry and Leslie Jensen have a nature based philosophy of the meaning of life like Buddhism that also relies heavily on small parts of many religions and some wisdom from the sixties social dissent movement.  And at the end reveals that JFK (without naming him) has influenced the direction of their lives and maybe a motive for his assassination being his open affection for women in an age of widespread male chauvinism. They explain their meaning of life and the main causes of our problems today that they reveal as unnatural creations and basic to understand with their easy going country rules of the heart for all relationships.  

This story begins in today's time when Kerry and Leslie are a retired elderly couple. At the end of chapter one, Kerry lies in bed feeling very weak, and the family doctor and priest arrive and he stays home instead of going to the hospital. That night, he slips into a coma and relives a few weeks of his life, in one day of real time, when he is thirty years old in the early nineteen sixties and is living and working for oil exploration companies in West Texas. During the next few chapters, the mindset of people's feelings about the social issues of the times are revealed, as well as Kerry's individual quest to discover a fair, rational, honest, and insightful religious and spiritual path of understandings to follow and emulate.

When Kerry is a young man who’s living and working in West Texas as a thirty year old in the early nineteen sixties a decade before he meets his wife Leslie,  he explains how he studies different world religions and that he’s beginning to question whether there is any true religion; and maybe that there is no true religion more valid than any other and that they all began at a time in history when there wasn’t anything close to a civilized society anywhere on earth compared to what we have today.  And that now things are changing fast for those centuries old ideas to hold up to because they are now on the cusp of a new age where these old ways may finally be exposed as unfair, unholy and untrue. 

The change of time settings reveals how much social progress we’ve made since the early sixties and how backwards peoples attitudes used to be back then compared to now.  The young men’s oil work and lifestyle is described along with their healthy distrust of business in general, which is joked about at length as they socialize after work in their motel rooms.

The two main characters philosophy contradicts the main theories and ideologies of today’s world terrorists and Al-Qaeda (without naming them) and reveals an American lifestyle of wisdom, honesty and loving understanding that accompanies the northern Midwest lifestyle that Kerry and Leslie grew up in.  This refutes our current perception and reputation abroad of a shallow, money-loving, mean and self-serving people that we’ve acquired since our response to 9/11.  The philosophical themes the two main characters have is a new way for us today to follow and live by when possible to hasten the day of world peace to arrive and stay.