I got a mysterious piece of mail yesterday. It was exciting. A real letter in the real mail; an envelope with my name and address hand-written, in writing that I didn’t recognize, with a nearby return address that belongs to no one I know. It’s from a neighborhood a mile or two west of here, but farther away than that sounds because it’s a peninsula with a valley between the two, so it’s complicated to reach by car and totally forbidding on foot. Who oh who could be writing to me from Magnolia? Could it be a threat? Abuse? A rant? Or could it be a friendly surprise?
It was exciting, but then I threw it aside when I got in, and forgot about it until this morning. Then I opened it. There was a little hand-written letter inside! You don’t see that every day. On lined notebook paper, the kind with holes on the left margin.
It was addressed to Dear Neighbor, and it says since she was unable to reach me at home (well thank god for that) she was sending me this very encouraging tract.
Yes, that’s the little secret I’ve been concealing from you: there was a tract inside too. I looked at the back of it. Jehovah’s Witnesses.
It’s from their library. It’s titled How do you view the future?
My favorite part is the section on epistemology:
CAN WE REALLY BELIEVE WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS?
Yes, for at least two reasons:
• God has the ability to fulfill the promise. In the Bible, Jehovah God alone is called “the Almighty,” for he has unlimited power. (Revelation 15:3) So he is fully able to keep his promise to change our world for the better. As the Bible says, “with God all things are possible.”—Matthew 19:26.
• God has the desire to fulfill the promise. For example, Jehovah has a longing to restore life to people who have died.—Job 14:14, 15.
Ahhhhhhh. Compelling reasons indeed.