I’d had a long day of teaching psychology. All I wanted to do now that I was home was go in, have dinner with my wife and unwind. But something blocked my front door. A large UPS box, addressed to me. Odd, I didn’t order anything. The label said it came from the American Bible Society.
I hefted the box through the door. “Honey, you know anything about this?” She didn’t. I cut it open. Well, no surprise—Bibles. A bunch of them. But no bill, no indication of who had ordered them.
The mystery nagged at me even as my wife and I caught each other up on our day. I told her about handing out the midterm grades. After 25 years at the Community College of Southern Nevada, I still enjoyed seeing those nervous looks on my students’ faces disappear when they discovered they’d passed.
Many of them struggled, either financially or academically; some were on their “second acts” in life. One, a woman in her late thirties, looked absolutely panic-stricken awaiting her grade—afterward, she couldn’t contain her joy. “Thank you, Jesus!” she cried out, loud enough to draw laughter from the other students.
“Thank you, Jesus” was the wife of a pastor who’d moved to a rough neighborhood in Las Vegas to plant a church. She was in her first semester in the nursing program, hoping to get a job to help with her family’s finances.
The next day, I spied the student in the cafeteria. I pulled up a chair and mentioned my odd delivery. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all those Bibles,” I said. The woman’s eyes lit up the way they had when she’d learned her midterm grade.
“My husband and I are trying to start a Bible study, but we can’t afford Bibles for our new members and folks don’t have money to spare,” she said.
“How many do you need?” I asked.
“Nineteen,” she said.
It would be weeks before an acquaintance finally confessed that she’d “been impressed” to donate the Bibles to me, convinced I’d know who to give them to. Why she’d sent 19—exactly 19—she couldn’t quite explain.
