A Lawrenceville pastor hand-delivered a family heirloom to a California family after using the power of social media to locate them.
Donna Whitten, pastor of 12 Stone Church in Lawrenceville, located a 150-year-old family Bible at an antique store in Tennessee several years ago.
"I happened to find this old bible - 1864 - in Chattanooga at an antique store. The look just got me. It was just really beautiful, the leather cover and how it was embossed and it had this great latch. And that's just from the outside," Whitten said on the Afternoon News Wrap with Russell Brown on Monday. "But I saw that inside, it was filled with obituaries that had actually been cut out of the paper and put inside, the births and deaths and marriages and everything were filled out."
Whitten said she held it for about five years and unsuccessfully attempted to locate the family on her own.
"I kind of gave up until about Easter of last year. Our theme around Easter was the story of the Prodigal Son and it's all about how far would you go to get back something that you've lost. And basically that's the story of God and how far he went through Jesus to get us back home to him," said Whitten. "And I started thinking, how far could we go to return something that was lost?"
Whitten turned the idea over to the church's social media manager, who posted information about the bible online. The social media outreach eventually led them to a woman in California.
"We finally landed with one lady who started giving us information and she knew things, things we hadn't put out there," Whitten said. "She actually had pictures of some of the people as well as a copy of a marriage certificate for two of the people that were [listed] in there. Come to find out, one of those people was her great-grandfather."
Whitten decided to hand-deliver the bible to the woman, all the way in California.
"Could we have dropped it in to FedEx? Once you realize it is a family heirloom and it means something to someone, I just felt really passionately about returning that personally back to her."
And, Whitten said the trip was more than just returning the bible.
"I also had the opportunity to one-on-one tell her, this didn't happen by accident. It's like God wanted to restore a heritage of faith to your family that's bigger than just this bible. And I got to tell her that she mattered to God, she mattered to 12 Stone, she mattered to all the people who worked so hard to find her and to get this back to her. I think that made a huge impact on her and to her family."
