The Last Twenty Dollars in Margaret's Purse

Margaret Thornton sat in her kitchen on Elm Street in Decatur, Illinois, staring at a single twenty-dollar bill. It was January 1983. The plant had closed. Her husband Earl had been gone two years. The furnace groaned against the cold, and the refrigerator held half a carton of eggs and some leftover soup.

She smoothed the bill flat on the table and did what she always did when the math stopped working — she opened her Bible. Her fingers found Hebrews 13, and she read the words aloud to the empty room: "I will never leave you nor forsake you."

Margaret didn't receive a miracle check in the mail that week. What happened was quieter than that. A neighbor brought a casserole Tuesday. Her church covered the gas bill without being asked. A friend from her quilting circle left a bag of groceries on the porch with no note.

By month's end, Margaret still had that twenty-dollar bill. She kept it folded in her Bible for the next thirty years — not as a good-luck charm, but as a monument to the faithfulness of the Almighty. "He never said I wouldn't run low," she told her granddaughter decades later. "He said He wouldn't leave. And He never did."