My Mom's Old Bible

MY MOM’S OLD BIBLE — The world will tell you my mom didn’t leave behind much in the way of possessions, but she left me something far better — her old Bible. Torn, taped, and tattered, with pages barely hanging on and half the maps long gone, the old cover makes it look like I rescued it out of a dumpster rather than had it lovingly passed down to me.

For more than 40 years, I carried that Bible like a man carries a compass in the wilderness. It was with me in the desert, the jungles, the mountains, and even in those mosquito-infested swamps. It rode with me on battleships, inside a squad car, in my backpack, and stuffed in my saddlebag. It stayed within arm’s reach like my government-issued Sig Sauer 9mm — ready for the next battle.

Those pages traveled through every season of my life — through a divorce that nearly crushed me, through the burial of a child no parent should ever have to endure, through a military career that literally sent me around the world, and through police calls in the dead of night… the memories that still wake me up — the ones of people I couldn’t save, scenes I can’t forget, and moments only God could help me carry.

Inside that Bible are two sets of handwriting — hers and mine — overlapping like a long conversation between a mother and her son. Her neat, steady notes. My desperate, late-night scrawl. Her prayers leaning forward. My tears soaking backward. The Word of God meeting both of us exactly where we were.

Some nights, I wrote in those margins when I was hanging on by a thread. Our notes overlap like generations talking to each other — her faith whispering courage into my fears, her scriptures answering questions I didn’t even know how to ask.

Every highlight, every crease, every tear in those pages carries a story. Some of them hurt. Some of them healed me. All of them held me up when I didn’t have the strength to stand on my own.

My mom’s old Bible isn’t worn out — it’s alive with the fingerprints of two lives holding on to the same Savior.

People who might think, “Your mom didn’t leave you much.” They would be wrong, because she left me everything.

She left me the Word of God — an inheritance you can’t lose, can’t spend, and can’t outgrow. She left me a testimony written in ink, tears, and hope. She left me a road map that still gets me home when life tries to send me down a dark road.

A mother, a son and her Bible, that when I hold it in my hands, I know I'm not poor. I am rich. Rich in grace. Rich in heritage. Rich in the kind of blessing you don’t measure in dollars, but in miles, scars, and answered prayers.

This old Bible laying in lap this morning, may be falling apart… but it’s the reason I didn’t.

In His love
ray