Man in Russia Steals His Grandmother’s Bible

In the 1920s Stalin ordered a purge of all Bibles and believers in Russia. Thousands of Bibles were taken and believers were sent to prison where many died for being enemies of the state. Recently someone mentioned that they knew a warehouse existed outside the town, where these Bibles had been stored since Stalin’s time. A truck was dispatched and several Russians to help load the Bibles. One helper was a young man - a skeptical, hostile, agnostic university student, who came only for the day’s wages. As they loaded the Bibles one man noticed that the student had disappeared. Finally they found him in a corner of the warehouse weeping. He had slipped away, hoping to quietly take a Bible for himself. What he found pierced him deeply. The inside page of the Bible he picked up had the handwritten signature of his own grandmother. It was her personal Bible. Out of the thousands of Bibles still left in that warehouse, he stole the one that belonged to his grandmother - a woman persecuted for her faith all her life. (Scocaster, April 23, 1995, p. 7).