Memories of being handed first Gideon bible

Hotels were a novelty to me when, having just graduated from school, I spent four months jumping on and off Greyhound buses, travelling across the rolling Canadian prairies, listening to country music and sleeping in cheap motels.

In one of those cheap and cheerful rooms, in the bedside drawer was a red and white laminated menu for the local Chinese restaurant; forget fish and chips, ginger beef was a wonder to me in 1982, for this nomadic English lad.

Alongside the menu was a

Gideon Bible, this was my second encounter with a Gideon Bible, and although I was now a Christian, it was still fresh.

I reminisced flipping through a bible years earlier when I was sitting in a laundrette on a drab and damp day.

I had just stamped out a cigarette on the floor when a grey-haired lady sat down next to me. She talked about life, about prayer, and then God.

Back then, it was indecipherable nonsense, an unknown language. At the end of the oneway discussion, she emptied her dryer and gave me a small white book. She encouraged me to read it, and it would change my life.

You have guessed it; it was the Gideon bible. I read it for a while, I flipped through, navigating the verses unconvincingly, as my mind joined the spinning washer. I collected my clothes, and as I walked out, I dumped the bible into the garbage — thinking, crazy woman.

I imagine now that she said a prayer for the young boy, who was smoking cigarettes while doing his mother’s laundry.

This week, I sat across from documentarian Ryan Stockert. As a filmmaker, Ryan loves stories, he was not raised religious but in Grade 5, was given a bible by the Gideons at his school.

He later embarked on a career in hard rock radio and media.

At some point in his teens, he decided to read a page of that bible every day, no matter the day or the circumstance.

More often than not, following headbanging parties, whether drunk, sober, or stoned, he would read a page of that little book. One night after a particularly wild party, he recalls that he had misplaced his bible; feeling compelled to read, he shouted to his friend,

“Do you have a bible I can read?”

His friend responded, “What, dude, why do you need a bible? Are you dying?”

Eventually, he wandered into a small church, listened to the sermon and realized that while he knew all the stories, he now started to understand what it all meant.

The point I want to make is that nothing is wasted, or God wastes nothing.

I love the thought that Jesus told many stories about seeking what was lost. A lost coin, lost sheep, lost son, and a lost coin.

Take heart, the lady in the launderette would never have expected that boy to become a pastor, or Ryan would become a globally known Christian filmmaker.

Nothing is wasted.