The Four Verses In His Handwriting

If you skipped my post

Pastor Wendell came to our church when I was six. He baptized me, married me and my husband, and baptized both of my kids. In thirty years he never preached one sermon about the end of the world.

Then he came home from a mission trip in 2024, stepped down, sold his house and moved to Montana. Two years of silence. Last Tuesday a Bible showed up on my porch with a sheet of notebook paper inside the cover. Four verses. No letter.

When he finally answered the phone, he walked me through every one of them. This is that paper, verse by verse, with the pages he had me open.

“Bread is only half of it. Every word is the other half.”Pastor Wendell, on the phone, Thursday afternoon

A day's work for one day's bread

He had me read the third seal out loud, standing in my kitchen.

“What do people use scales for?” he asked. Weighing things. “You weigh what is short. Nobody weighs what there is plenty of.”

Then the second verse on the paper:

He didn't explain it. He let me work it out with my finger on the page.

I said, “That is groceries.” He said, “That is groceries.”

And the part nobody quotes: hurt not the oil and the wine. The bread gets weighed. The expensive things are left alone. Then he sent me to a verse I had never read in my life:

Bread by weight. A limit per customer, written down thousands of years before anybody built a grocery store.

Read the order, not just the words

He said he preached Matthew 24 for thirty years and never noticed the word order until the plane ride home.

“Wars first. Then famine. Not at the same time. After.”

Then one more, for every week the news says they're close to a deal:

“Not a famine of bread”

“Everything I just had you read is about bread,” he said. “Now watch what Jesus did with bread.”

Forty days in the wilderness with nothing to eat, and the devil comes to Him with the one thing a starving man wants. Turn these stones into bread. Jesus answers him out of Moses:

“He was starving, and He still said bread is only half of it. Every word is the other half. Fill your pantry if you want to. That's the easy half. Every store in America still sells bread. Amos is telling you the other half runs short too.”

“Read that again,” he said. “They're not people who never cared. They're looking. They're running. And they can't find it.”

The test he gave me in my own kitchen

He asked if I had a Bible in the house. I said I had four. He said, “Turn to Jude, the little book right before Revelation. Verse fourteen. I'll wait.”

So I went looking for it.

“Count them,” he said. “Four Bibles in your house, and not one of them has the book your Bible is quoting. That's what Amos meant. It doesn't start with no Bibles. It starts with Bibles that have pages missing, and nobody noticing.”

The famine was already in my kitchen. I had just never gone looking.

Where the book went, and who it was written for

Enoch was never printed in the King James, not even in 1611. And the King James itself got shorter: the first one, in 1611, printed 80 books. In 1826 a Bible society in London voted to stop printing fourteen of them.

But one church never made its Bible shorter. Ethiopia is in your Bible, in Acts 8: an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah in his chariot, baptized by the side of the road. The church there kept the Scriptures for something like 1,500 years, Enoch and Jubilees included.

And this is the page that made me put the phone down. Enoch says, on his first page, who he was writing for:

“He didn't hide any of it,” Wendell said. “He wrote it down, he put who it was for on the first line, and he assumed somebody would keep it. Ethiopia did.”

Every word. Not most of them.

I asked him why it had to be the whole thing. Paper is paper, right? He said, “A Bible on paper with the pages missing is still missing them. Paper keeps what's in it. It can't give you back what was cut out.”

“That's what Jesus said a person lives by,” he said. “Every word. You find out which kind of Bible you bought the first time your kid asks you something and the answer was in the part that got cut.”

The three places he told me to start

“Don't try to read all of it,” he said. “That's the first thing people get wrong. Read three things this month, while nothing depends on it.”

You just read it, above. Who it was written for.

After the flood, the spirits went after Noah's grandsons. Here's what Noah did:

A father praying over his kids' kids, in the days right after the worst thing that ever happened to the world. I read it with Owen asleep down the hall.

Books 86 and 87, at the very back. It's an early church writing the Ethiopian church kept, set as the risen Jesus answering His disciples. They ask Him about the end again:

Same famines. Same nations rising. And no date. An order instead: watch and pray. Most of the rest of the book is exactly that: how the early church prayed, and when, while it waited.

Wendell's four checks

“Don't take my word for one thing I've told you,” he said. “Most of what gets sold to people who are worried is junk. Do these four things first.”

What happened in our house that week

And I'm not scared of Owen's questions anymore. When he brings me something from one of those videos, I don't say “nobody really knows.” I go get the book.

What readers say

Count the houses with a kid in them

I ordered three: one for Rachel, one for my brother Tyler, one for my mom and dad. First Timothy 5:8 says to provide for your own, “and specially for those of his own house.” Wendell mailed boxes to the families he baptized. That was the same idea.

Bigger family? 4 or more copies drop to $41.95 each, on the same page.

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It's probably for you if

• You've read Matthew 24 your whole life and never noticed the order
• There's a Bible in every room of your house, and you've never once held the book Jude quotes
• Your kids take their questions to a phone before they bring them to you
• Somebody in your family has called you dramatic about the news this year