Last year, we lived in a small house on a busy road. It had four bedrooms and there were six roommates. It was small, but it was comfortable. When summer rolled around it was time for us to go our separate ways and head off to camp, home, or internships. To save money we decided to sublease the house. The guys who were subleasing lived on campus and had no furniture of their own. It worked out perfectly because we could keep our stuff there which eliminated the hassle of having to move out and they could use our furniture instead of having to buy new furniture. We left the house with much of our things still in it.
Fast forward through the summer: my roommates and I were sitting around in the new house we had just moved into. We were watching the television and talking with each other, when my roommate Cory sat up excitedly and said to Will, another roommate, “Let’s go check out that book that Joe was talking about.” Will instantly became as excited as Cory. They jumped up together and sprinted for the stairs. Not fully understanding what could be so exciting about a book, I nonetheless found myself caught up in the excitement and running up the stairs behind them. When we got to Will’s room he pulled out a book called The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. Will flipped open the cover and pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper that was placed inside. Cory explained that they met someone the day before that was one of the guys who had subleased our old house over the summer. Cory described how the guy told him that he found this book under Cory and Will’s bunk bed (it’s a wonder he found anything under that bunk bed) and how it turned out to be just the thing he needed to read.
This is was the letter read:
To the owner of this book,
To the owner of this book,
I am writing you this to tell you that you have saved my life.
Here is my story:
Here is my story:
Throughout my early years, I was raised in the church. I was taught how to take communion and how to say my prayers. I never questioned the culture in which I grew up, and needless to say, as I got older, my faith all but evaporated. I was trying to live my life by the merit system and existed under the promise of “relative morality”. However, the love and Grace of God was nowhere to be found. I had become a skeptic of the Christian faith and at the same time there was a void in my life that I could simply not fill. All of this is changing. It began one Sunday afternoon when I was feeling alone and empty when I realized out of nowhere that earthly wants could no longer keep me blindfolded. I prayed the Lord’s prayer and immediately felt comforted. This was a very exciting moment, but I did not know where to go from there.
At this point is where I felt God reach out to me for the first time. The very next morning, a Monday, I was looking for my glasses under the bed in the room I was staying. I had lived there for about eight weeks and not known that anything other than my clothes were under there. It was there that I found this book and it was then that my walk toward/with Christ began. It is now Thursday and after having just completed [this book], I can honestly say that my doubts of Christianity have been extinguished and I am making a dead sprint to heaven through Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.
Yours in Christ,
TX AG ‘12
He was looking for his glasses under the bed. Instead he found a book that led him to faith in Jesus and a vision for life that is clearer than one any pair of glasses could produce.
