The Letter That Arrived Thirty Years Late

In 1987, Margaret Ellison taught a Wednesday night Bible study for teenagers in a cinder-block church basement in Terre Haute, Indiana. She brought homemade snickerdoodles every week and insisted her students look up every verse themselves — no shortcuts. Most Wednesday nights, she drove home wondering if any of it stuck.

In 2017, a letter arrived at that same church, forwarded three times before it reached her retirement home in Evansville. A woman named Danielle Torres, now a missionary nurse in Guatemala, wrote to say she had been one of those teenagers. She described how Margaret's patient insistence on opening the actual Bible had shaped everything — her marriage, her calling, her decision to uproot her family and serve in a village with no running water. "You taught me that the truth was worth the inconvenience of finding it myself," Danielle wrote.

Margaret's daughter found her that afternoon sitting in her recliner, reading the letter for the fourth time, tears running freely down her face.

The apostle John understood this exact joy. Writing to his beloved Gaius, he declared, "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth." Not success. Not comfort. Not recognition. The deepest joy available to a spiritual parent is discovering that someone you poured into is still walking faithfully — perhaps in ways you never imagined and in places you will never visit.