Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner recalls one low time in his life when God broke through in an unusual way. "I remember sitting parked by the roadside once," Buechner writes, "terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter's illness and what was going on in our family." As he was sitting there thinking about his daughter's illness, he noticed a car that seemed to come from nowhere. His message from God, the word he most needed to see at that moment, was found on the license plate. This personalized license plate, well, let me tell you in Buechner's own words, it "bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST."

Sitting in his car along side the highway, God's message was revealed on the license plate of a passing car. It's certainly difficult to describe such an experience. "Was the experience something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while?" Or was it the word of God?" I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both," Buechner wrote, "but for me it was an epiphany." The owner of the car turned out to be a trust officer at a local bank. After reading of the incident somewhere, the trust officer paid a personal visit to Buechner one afternoon. He presented Buechner with the license plate which bore the word which he so desperately needed to see that day, TRUST. Buechner placed that license plate on a bookshelf where it serves to remind him of his trust in God. "It is rusty around the edges and a little battered," he later wrote, "and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen."