Bone-Dry

The Library, by JJcanvas
     

Pastor’s Epistle—July 2026

An old memory recently came to mind at our Summer Bible Study on miracles. Forgive me if you’ve heard me tell it to you before.

The summer after seventh grade, my family moved. The basement of our new house had yet to be finished, so we stored a lot of the boxes that we hadn’t yet gotten through down below, including quite a few packed-up books.

Alas, when autumn came around, we learned that our fresh, clean, concrete basement had been built over a seasonal spring, and the whole thing flooded. We came home on the evening of my birthday to find three feet of standing water working its way up the stairs.

My mother waded waist-high through the deluge, taking stock of the damage, when, looking down, she spotted something yellow and rectangular on the bottom. She reached underneath, soaking her entire arm, pulled the object up, and immediately grew pale.

Our home congregation, which I’d attended ever since my birth and baptism, used bright yellow Good News Bibles for Sunday School and Youth Group lessons. These were hardcovers, but economically published, with pages so thin that they reminded me of onionskin or tracing-paper. We had to be delicate with them.

I’d taken one home—let’s be generous and call it on long-term loan—and hadn’t gotten around to returning it. I’d packed it away with other books, and left it in the basement. This was the yellow rectangle that my mother found in the flood, submerged for hours beneath a yard of water. By rights, it ought to have been mush, little more than woodpulp and paste.

Without saying a word, she passed it to me. And somehow that flimsy little Bible was bone-dry: no moisture, no wrinkles, not so much as a drop. We’d both seen it down there, unprotected, underwater. Yet here it was, in my hand, in perfect condition. We just stared at each other.

Mom soon called her brother, a Lutheran pastor, to ask him what it could mean. “How should I know?” he laughed in reply. Indeed, how should we? I wish I could say that I’d derived some deeper truth or insight from this impossible occurrence. All I can state for certain is that it happened. You don’t have to believe me, but I have to.

My life has been full of oddities: little miracles, little wonders, little terrors that I can neither explain nor deny. I take them as gifts, as reminders, that the world remains both weirder and wilder than we tend to give it credit for. Reminders of something greater, something more. Reminders that the world we know is only the start of the story.

In Jesus. Amen.