lost rings found
Last fall I lost two of my rings….AGAIN! It wasn’t the first time.
My daughter and husband tore apart the house, reaching into the garbage disposal, scouring the floors, the trash compactor. I knew that they weren’t lost lost. They had to be in the house. At 12:30 AM I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and did it all again by myself. Finally in desperation I started pulling trash out of the compactor. There was nowhere left to look. So even though Dave had done that before, I did it once more. And there at the bottom of the bag were my two gold rings.
I thanked God for hearing my prayer about something so temporal and mundane as two lost rings. Jesus’ parable of the woman who lost a coin in Luke 15:8-10 slides right in between the lost sheep and the lost son, the Prodigal Son. Sheep were so important in the agrarian economy of Jesus day. And a son is a son, a precious, loved child, essential to the continuation of the family line. A coin has value, but minimal when compared to the living beings. Jesus is demonstrating his understanding of our anxiety over any lost thing.
I should feel this passion for lost relationships, lost friendships, and I do. I grieve over people that have slipped out of my life, and I desire to see those relationships restored. Unfortunately, it often takes two to bring about that kind of restoration. Finding a lost inanimate object is so much easier than finding a lost friend. The rings or the coins are simply lying there, waiting to be found. The friend has moved on, changed her address, her email address. The friend no longer takes your calls. It’s no one’s fault, or more accurately it’s everyone’s fault. But it happens.
However, the lost coin or the lost rings found, give us hope. God intends to restore. Shalom means that every bad thing will come undone in the end. Maybe not until the end. But as the quote attributed to everyone from Oscar Wilde to John Lennon says, “In the end, everything will be ok. If it’s not ok, it’s not yet the end.”
Love, Liz
