Not Your Average Joe

Maria Braun shuffled around in her great-aunt’s small, dusty attic sorting through boxes and trunks. 

Boxes full with the treasured and forgotten things that are left behind to mark the passing of a life.

Most of it she tossed.

Some she boxed up, and a few heirlooms and mementos she divided among family. 

But what to do with the Bible she found? You can’t throw away a Bible. But it was in English, and had been dog-eared and written in.

No one would want it. Someone had written notes in all of the margins and inside the front and back covers. 

Conflicted about what to do with this old, well-used, once loved Bible, she set it aside and forgot about it.

But one day she came across it again and began to wonder about its owner and how it ended up in a box in her great-aunt’s attic. She looked at the inscription, written in a woman’s hand, and could only make out a few of the English words she recognized. Then she noticed it: a faded, smudged phone number in the corner of the back, inside cover.

It took a while to get up the nerve, but finally, she dialed the phone number. The woman on the other end spoke only English, and Maria’s English was extremely limited. Over the bad connection, she read the name inside the Bible aloud, “Joe Smith,” and then said, “Bible.”(Okay, her name was not Maria Braun and Joe’s last name was not Smith, but we’re going with that for now…)

After some halting and confusing back and forth, Maria managed to get an address from the woman on the other end for Joe. An address in California in the United States.

“Dankeschön (Thank you),” she said, then hung up.

She began to search for packaging material sufficient for the long trip from Germany to Southern California.

A year later, in San Gabriel, California, I looked up as my friend, Angel, walked into my classroom at the end of a long day.

“Do you know someone named Joe Smith?” she asked with a perplexed look on her face.

I flipped through the Rolodex in my head, searching through decades of friends and acquaintances, but came up empty.

She said a friend of hers from church had approached her with a bizarre story. An acquaintance of his had asked him if he knew anyone named Liz Rosas who was a teacher at one of the church schools in Southern California.

He didn’t, but said he had a friend from church who taught at the school in San Gabriel.

Maybe she knew someone who knew someone who knew this Liz Rosas. And so he called my best friend, Angel.

Angel said this Joe Smith was asking for my phone number, saying that he really needed to talk to me.

I had no idea who he was, so I declined

to give my number to my friends friend whose acquaintance knew someone named Joe who lived in Germany and was asking for me.

But then, feeling guilty, I reconsidered and told Angel to pass along my email address.  A week or so later I got the most amazing email from Joe Smith in Germany who said I was one of the most influential people in his life.

I felt terrible that I had no idea still who this man was, but continued to read.

Two decades earlier (when I was a newlywed living up in the mountains at Camp Cedar Falls), I had been influential in his giving his life to Jesus.

I still had no idea who Joe Smith was.

He said that I’d made such an impact on his life that he got baptized in that freezing creek up at camp the summer he was sixteen. And I gave him a Bible with his name engraved on the front in gold letters and an inscription inside.

I began to have a fuzzy recollection of Joe. But it was nothing more than a fleeting glimpse of a boy I barely recalled, but for whom I wanted to do something special to commemorate his baptism.

He said that not long after I gave him that Bible, he joined the military and bounced around from place to place, his Bible the only real anchor in his life.

But somehow, one day in Germany, he lost his Bible. And slowly, eventually, he not only forgot the Bible, but his walk with the Lord. He lost himself in the life of military buddies and drinking and partying.

Years later, now out of the military, he was married with a young child of his own, and living once again back in Germany. One day, he got a package in the mail from his mother back home in California.

He tore open the packaging only to find another package inside. A package also addressed to him, but in a stranger’s hand, and with a return address in Germany, less than 100 miles from where he now lived.

Odd, he thought. Then he opened the inner package and found a familiar, old Bible, dog-eared and worn. He flipped through the pages, and the notes in the margins tugged at his heart.

Then he saw the inscription inside from the young woman who gave the Bible to him some twenty years earlier. And thus began his convoluted quest to track down a Liz Rosas somewhere in Southern California.

Eventually he found someone who knew someone, who had known her and her husband long ago. He heard that they had divorced and she was maybe a teacher at one of the church schools in Southern California still, but they didn’t know which one.

And through his persistence, Joe finally tracked me down at the church school there in San Gabriel at a time when my life was difficult. I had lost someone I loved to pancreatic cancer, followed by a fellow teacher’s death to breast cancer, a friend’s murder and her husband’s death a week later.

So much of life was questionable at this point. It was easy to question life and God and everything.

And in all the chaos, God sent me Joe and his rededication to the Lord.

Joe and his worn, dog-eared, note-riddled Bible that had crossed the ocean twice before it found him again. And then only after a German housewife found it in a dusty box in her great-aunt’s attic.

And that gift, which touched a young man’s heart so deeply when I gave it to him twenty years earlier now came back to give me a gift.

The gift of faith and renewed belief in the miracles of God’s love.

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