An Oklahoma family has been reunited with their late mother’s Bible after a man found it on his front lawn.
Terry Ward, the man who found the Bible, had been mowing his front lawn last week when he noticed a Bible in his flower bed.
“It rained all night, so it must have just been there for a little while because it wasn’t wet,” Ward told NBC affiliate KFOR-TV. “Just laying there with some screws and some bullets.”
Ward immediately thought about getting the Bible back to its rightful owner after he noticed that it had the name Pearl Williams in it and was dated 1946.
“Who is Pearl Williams, and where does she live?” he recalled asking himself. “I asked City Hall, and they had no record of her.”
Ward continued this effort by calling the Nicoma Park Police Department, who found the Del City address inside the Bible.
“So, I contacted the Del City Police Department, and they went by the address,” said Lt. Mike Weiss with the Nicoma Park Police Dept. “Luckily, the Bible’s owner – her son – still lived at that address.”
Lisa Bennett, Pearl’s daughter, told KFOR-TV that her family couldn’t believe that their late mother’s Bible made its way to their home.
“It was very emotional,” Bennett said. “We lost my mom in October. So that was hard enough, and now to find out that I have her Bible gives me part of her.”
She added that the Bible also included many precious memories that her late mother tucked inside.
“Her wedding announcement was in the Bible from where she and my dad got married,” Bennett explained. “She kept different things that were very important to her.”
“She was a big part of my life, so when I lost her, I lost a lot of her,” she continued. “Finding little bits and pieces and keeping little pieces of her helps me rebuild that little loss in my heart.”
Bennett also expressed gratitude to the man who found the Bible as well as the police for their investigative work.
“This is the kind of story that makes it nice to be a police officer,” Weiss said. “It makes it nice to be an investigator that you can find somebody’s family Bible and return it to them.”
Police have since conducted a further investigation to determine whether the Bible and other items were stolen from Pearl’s home after she died.
Photo courtesy: ©Sparrowstock
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer. He is also the co-hosts of the For Your Soul podcast, which seeks to equip the church with biblical truth and sound doctrine. Visit his blog Blessed Are The Forgiven.