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.…