THE TESTAMENT GOD GAVE BACK

Lee Snyder

Walking home from school, head bent into the wind, shivering in a thin blue coat, the child is hardly aware of the dead sky or pelting sleet as she prays. As she treks down the road toward the farmhouse, the dormant fields fold into the awful silence. Even the girl’s shoes make no sound against the wet stones of the graveled pavement. With a child’s unmitigated belief, absorbed from life in the church community, this girl knows that God is real and means what he says.

This was my first crisis of faith, I now realize, and a marker along the way toward discovering my place in the God-scheme. I was six. My most prized possession was a maroon Gideon New Testament. One day I lost it. I was devastated. When it did not turn up after much searching, I began praying that God would give it back. My prayers became pleading, demanding. "Please God. Please God."

How many days did these relentless prayers go on? Did my mother become concerned when I asked four, five, or six times a day where else we could look? I imagine Dad obliging me when I thought of yet another place to check, down behind the seat cushions of the Chevy.

Even after Mom and Dad had exhausted every possibility in helping me search for the New Testament, I hung on to a grim hope that my prayer would be answered. Going to bed, buried in one of the family quilts, I tried to think of ways God might respond. I knew that God, so choosing, could simply open up the heavens, reach down, and return the New Testament. It was as simple as that. There was the story from Sunday school where God meets Moses but allows Moses only to see God’s back. Maybe God would allow me to see his hand reaching down out of the clouds, handing me the Testament?

My prayers continued for days, with a fierce insistence and an unwavering belief that God would intervene and honor his promise, "Ask and you shall receive." While my parents knew how much I wanted my Bible back, I have no idea if they sensed the desperate drama going on between their oldest child and God. What would Heaven do with a six-year old who believed literally that God was going to give back the Testament?

God gave it back.

While the details remain hazy, it must have happened something like this: One evening a car pulled up into the driveway. A man got out and knocked on the door. From way on the other side of town, Mr. Edwards showed up at the door. "I brought something I think your little girl must have left at our place the other week when you stopped in. We found this after you left." In his hand, Mr. Edwards held out the maroon Testament. "I was just driving over this way anyway, and the wife thought your daughter might want this back."

I did not even hear my father thank Mr. Edwards. It was not until Dad had closed the front door that I could move.

"Here you are," Dad said. "I knew it would turn up."

Mom, hearing the commotion, came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. "Where did that come from?" looking first at Dad then at me.

"Mr. Edwards dropped it off. We left it at their new house when we went over to see their house plans."

All Mom said was, "I had no idea you took your Bible along."

She went back to clean up the kitchen. Dad took up his reading. The household settled back to normal.

While that experience appears to an adult as embarrassingly naïve, I have no doubt that God answered my prayer. It was as though the heavens had opened and God had handed back my Testament.

That child-God encounter was one marker along the way of discovering one’s place—a place in the God-scheme of things. Finding one’s place, both literally and figuratively, reaches toward the ineffable and yields glimpses of both the imagined and the not yet in our consciousness. That place is where we start from.

—Lee Snyder, Harrisonburg, Virginia, is President Emeritus, Bluffton University, and in the midst of writing the memoir from which this story is excerpted.