I was upset when I did not find my scriptures in their usual place. I had them only the Sunday evening before and now another Sunday was coming up and I needed them to prepare to teach Gospel Doctrine class.

I searched my desk, then the car, and then the whole house, but nothing. During the early part of the week my missing scriptures were merely an inconvenience, but toward the latter part of the week this problem was escalating into something more than that. Of course, I had other copies of the scriptures in the house I could have used, but they were not the same.

Therefore, as days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, this issue plagued me. An important part of my life was missing. I widened my search. I determined I had them last at a fireside at some friends' house some distance away. I asked them to look around their house. Nothing. I even polled all the people who had been there that night, thinking that someone had taken them home inadvertently. Still nothing.

On the off chance I might have dropped them in the friend's driveway or street while getting in and out of the car, my wife and I searched all around. I have this bad habit of putting things on the top of the car while I get in and then reach up to retrieve them. Sometimes I forget, only to have the object tumble off a few meters down the road. But by this time it was fall and leaves hid everything. No luck.

To this day I am surprised by the effect my missing scriptures had on me. It was like something was not right in the world, but I didn't know what. It preyed on my mind — and my spirit. It became clear that more was going on than the inconvenience of an ordinary lost object.

I considered making this a matter of prayer. Who hasn't heard stories of people finding things after praying? But I refrained. I didn't want to bother the Lord about such a small matter. It was not like I lacked a testimony of the power of prayer; I have seen miraculous things occur in my life and that of my family due to prayer. Many of these were matters of life and death. Compared to these it seemed inappropriate to pray for such a small thing.

Then I happened to find a quote that stopped me in my tracks. In Dr. S. Michael Wilcox's book, House of Glory , he records an anecdote by Elder John A. Widtsoe, who was not bothered by making “practical problems” a matter of prayer, even in the temple. Elder Widtsoe says, “I would rather take my practical problems to the House of the Lord than anywhere else.” He further describes how,

for several years , under a Federal grant with my staff of workers we had gathered thousands of data in the field of soil moisture; but I could not extract any general law running through them. I gave up at last. My wife and I went to the temple that day to forget the failure. In the third endowment room, out of the unseen, came the solution, which has long since gone into print.

What seemed good enough for Elder Widtsoe was certainly good enough for me, and in my next visit to the temple during an endowment session I made this a matter of prayer, asking the Lord to restore these scriptures to me. Not many days after, while discussing this with the hostess of the fireside the notion that I had set the scriptures on top of the car only to have to them fall off, she said that she did recall seeing a black object on the road a mile or so away from her house the day after the fireside. It was a lead.

The next Saturday, my wife and I walked up and down this lonely stretch of road to see what we could find. It was a heavily wooded section of road and the leaf bed was thick. We almost despaired of finding anything in the thick tangle of weeds, leaves and detritus along the barrow pits. It had rained and the leaves were matted. On the shady side of the road, ice crystals had formed among the leaves. We poked around with sticks, all to no avail.

Then my wife turned over a clump of roadside debris and there in the middle was the black, homemade leather cover and a little further away the quad's own cover. This spurred us on. Soon pages started to appear. There was one here and one there. Sometimes we turned up a sodden mass of several dozen pages. In one spot were pages from the Old Testament and further on were sections of the Doctrine and Covenants spread over half a mile. After several hours of work we had recovered about 75 percent of the missing scriptures. We took them home in a cardboard box filled with pages and bits of pages all mixed in with leaves and debris.

Then began the work of restoration. Some pages I put right with a hair blowdryer; others I smoothed out with an iron. I stacked the pages according to which book they belonged to and then ordered them by page number. To my delight I discovered that nearly all of the underlining and marginal notes could still be made out. While this pile of wrinkled pages was not usable in the ordinary sense, they were in good enough condition I could transfer all my markings to the new set of scriptures I had received for Christmas.

Now I have the best of both worlds. I have the old scriptures and a new set as well. My years of gospel study have been preserved, and I have embarked on a new round of study as I have transferred each underlined scripture and note into the new book. I am reminded of why I marked the scripture in the first place and rehearse in my mind the doctrinal import of each one. What seemed like a loss has become a blessing.