The Man Who Buried His Bible
The hole was no deeper than his forearm, but Jacob stared at it like it went straight to hell.
He knelt beside it with the Bible pressed against his chest, the leather worn smooth from decades of sweat, sermons, and secrets. The morning fog clung low over the field, and the frost had stiffened the soil, making each shovelful a struggle. But he’d insisted on doing it himself.
No one else knew he was here.
It was the back corner of his grandfather’s old property, now long sold to strangers who let the place rot. The barn had collapsed years ago. The porch had sunk. Yet the land still felt sacred, or at least familiar enough for something like this.
He touched the edge of the hole with his free hand, then looked at the Bible again.
“Forgive me,” he whispered. “I just… I can’t anymore.”
He set it gently in the dirt.
For a moment, he half-expected something to happen. A wind to rise. A bird to cry. A voice from the heavens. But the only sound was the steady breath of his own grief.
Jacob covered the Bible slowly. One handful at a time.
When it was done, he stood up, wiped his palms on his jeans, and walked away without looking back.
Jacob wasn’t always like this.
He used to be the man who quoted Scripture in line at the grocery store. The man who laid hands on strangers in hospital rooms. He’d preached with trembling lips and eyes that welled up every time he said the name Jesus.
But life, as it does, kept coming. And one day, it didn’t just knock on the door — it came through the walls.
It started with Hannah. Her sickness was cruel in its speed. One week it was headaches. The next, seizures. And then the quietest funeral he’d ever seen.
He had prayed, oh how he had prayed. Fasting. Pleading. Rebuking. Quoting every healing verse he knew. “By His stripes we are healed,” he repeated like a mantra over her hospital bed. But she still died.
Then came the silence.
No more visions. No more goosebumps during worship. Just quiet. A God who once spoke with fire and whisper now said nothing at all.
Still, Jacob kept going. Because he thought that’s what faith meant — showing up even when it didn’t make sense. He preached Hannah’s funeral. He comforted others. He said all the right things.
Until the day he woke up and realized he hadn’t prayed in six months.
That scared him.
But it didn’t change him.
The slow erosion of his faith was quieter than any sin he’d ever confessed. No affair. No scandal. Just the dull, persistent ache of absence.
It was a Wednesday morning when he first thought about burying the Bible.
He had been cleaning out the garage, trying to organize the remnants of a life that no longer felt like his. And there it was, in a battered box labeled “sermons,” beneath yellowed notebooks and dried-out pens: his old Bible.
Opening it was like touching a ghost.
The pages knew his tears, his underlines, his sweaty palms during altar calls. They smelled like pulpit wood and stale coffee. Verses were circled, highlighted, cross-referenced. Margins filled with desperate prayers and half-formed revelations.
And in the center of it all — taped to the back cover — was a photo of Hannah.
She was laughing in the picture. The wind had caught her hair, and her eyes were squinting against the sun. That day had been warm and full of grace.
But the warmth was gone now.
Jacob set the Bible down and stared at it for a long time.
That night, he couldn’t sleep. The thought returned, over and over.
What if I buried it?
It wasn’t anger. That surprised him.
He wasn’t mad at God — not really. He was tired. Tired of the hope that teased. Tired of the verses that used to spark joy and now only echoed. Tired of telling people he still believed when the truth was more complicated.
The burial felt right, somehow.
Not a renunciation.
More like a surrender.
Not of God, but of the version of God he had carried too long.
Two weeks passed after the burial, and life returned to its usual rhythm. Or tried to.
But something shifted in Jacob.
He couldn’t quite explain it, but the silence grew heavier. Not just around him, but inside him.
He began waking up in the middle of the night with dreams he couldn’t remember and a feeling of unfinished sentences hanging in the dark.
One night, around 3 a.m., he found himself out of bed, grabbing his coat, and driving back to the field.
He didn’t even bring a shovel.
He dug with his hands.
The soil was colder now, and damp. His fingernails split. Dirt caked under them. But he kept digging.
When he found the Bible, he sat back on his heels and wept.
Not because of guilt. Not because of some dramatic realization.
But because the Bible wasn’t ruined.
He had half-hoped it would be. That it would give him permission to move on.
But the leather was intact. The pages, though damp, still clung together. The photo of Hannah? Smudged but visible.
And in that moment — not loud, not dramatic — a verse surfaced in his mind like a forgotten melody:
“A bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not snuff out.”
He hadn’t thought of that verse in years.
He whispered it. Again. Again. Each time quieter.
It wasn’t lightning. It wasn’t fire.
It was something smaller.
A flicker.
Jacob took the Bible home.
He dried it on the radiator, page by page.
He didn’t start preaching again. Didn’t announce a revival.
But the next morning, he read one verse. Just one.
And the next day, another.
Some days he read with disbelief. Some days with bitterness. Some days with longing.
But he read.
And slowly, the silence began to feel less like absence and more like invitation.
He still didn’t have answers.
He still missed Hannah with an ache that sat in his chest like a stone.
But the Bible — the one he had buried in the cold ground — now lay open again on his table.
And sometimes, when he read it, he didn’t feel alone.
Years later, when he was much older and the field had been paved over for housing, Jacob told a young man in his church about the time he buried his Bible.
The young man looked shocked.
“You buried it?”
Jacob nodded.
“And then I dug it back up.”
The young man didn’t know what to say.
Jacob smiled, and tapped the Bible beside him, its pages soft with use.
“Grace,” he said, “doesn’t leave you where it finds you.”
And then he added, almost to himself, “Even if you bury it.”