The Night the Numbers Stopped Adding Up

Robert Chambers spread the bills across the kitchen table at eleven on a Tuesday in March. The envelope from the bank sat unopened at the corner — he already knew what was inside. Six weeks since the Meridian plant closed, and the severance was nearly gone. His wife Dana stood in the doorway in her robe, watching him. "Are we going to be okay?" she asked.

He didn't answer, because he didn't know.

What he did know was that his grandfather Carl had walked out of the Great Depression with nothing but a worn King James Bible and a plot of clay-hard Kansas soil. Carl used to say he'd never been afraid of losing money because he'd learned early that money makes a terrible god. "It leaves," Carl would say. "Everything leaves. Except the Lord."

Robert pushed the bills aside and opened his phone — not to check his balance, but to find the verse Carl had written out for him years before in a shaky hand on a notecard that still lived in his wallet: Hebrews 13:5. Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.