Editorial: Bible a special find

A good Samaritan found someones bible and handed it into police.

The headline said "Found God but lost your Bible?".

The story?

A good Samaritan found someone's misplaced Good Book and handed it into police.

We read about it in our "Lost and Found" ads.

And now we can say "Lost Bible finds owner" after Francis Heremaia read our story, and was yesterday reunited with his Bible.

Francis is a taxi driver, who had the Bible in his vehicle.

Somehow, it fell out in central Whangarei two weeks ago and, as reporter Kristin Edge writes today, after having it at arm's length for six years, it was gone.

Until yesterday.

There were several reasons we wrote about Francis' Bible.

Reason One - a white cane, handed into police.

Reason Two - a bag containing several items, handed into police.

Reason Three - a black guitar with white trim.

And so on and so on.

It struck us that often we hear about the things that go missing, but in recent weeks there have been more than a dozen found items advertised by Whangarei police. These are items that could easily have fallen prey to the "finders, keepers" adage.

But they didn't. We thought that worth mentioning. There is a serendipitous addendum to the story of Francis' Bible - it was handed to police by an Advocate reporter, Mike Barrington.

Mike had been waiting in the Whangarei police station foyer to speak to a police officer about a story, and took temporary custody of the Bible from the gentleman who found it, and took it to the station, but had to leave. Nice to see the power of the Lord and power of the media combining.