No coincidence

I just had to write a quick post about something fun that happened recently.

My spouse and I took a weekend at a local hotel for our anniversary. (33 years!  Woo!)  One of the drawbacks to our tiny townhouse is that it doesn’t have a proper bathtub, and a long hot bath is one of my favorite ways to relax.  There’s a hotel near my office that has a whole bunch of jacuzzi suites, so we have occasionally gone there for our anniversary weekends over the past years.

Whenever I go to a hotel I check to see if there is a Gideon bible, and there usually is.  And before I check out, I’ll leave some helpful annotations in it.  Sometimes on the pages where they are recommending certain passages to read for certain concerns, I’ll add a note to be certain to check out the actual story of Gideon, or the story of Dinah, or Judges 1:19, or some other part that most christians aren’t aware of.  But I’ll always go to the first page and line through “In the beginning” and write in “Once upon a time”.

We cut our trip short this time because of way too much snow, but as we were packing up I realized that I hadn’t done my usual annotations yet, so I pulled out the bible to at least add a quick “Once upon a time.”  But it was already there!  I grinned – was somebody else doing this too?  Were there enough people not taking this book seriously that I had encountered another “fixed” bible?  Wow!

Alas, I quickly realized that the annotation was in my own handwriting.  Apparently we had stayed in the same room in a previous year.  Oh, well.  At least that shows how little used those bibles are.  The book looked brand spanking new, no wear and tear at all.  And even though the Gideons encourage people to keep the bibles if they want to, nobody had taken this one.  It was still there, pretty much untouched, for years.  I hope that someday all “holy books” can be so thoroughly ignored.