found while carrying a box

This morning I found a ring I lost two years ago. I was unpacking boxes – carrying something from the kitchen to the pantry. I happened to look down and saw, there in the crevice between the kitchen sill and the pantry floorboards a small, shiny circlet. Stooping down, I retrieved a tiny ring I had not seen since we moved out of this house nearly two years ago. I don’t know if it had been lying there the entire time or if it fell out of the box I was emptying. I didn’t hear it fall, but it might have, or perhaps I stepped on a board in the just the right place to dislodge it from a hiding place. Our house was occupied while we were away, so it seems unlikely that it had lain there unnoticed for the entire twenty-one months. It is a mystery to me, but it fit my smallest finger perfectly once again.

I could not help but think of all the rings I have lost over the years; I love rings, but I seem to have terrible luck with them. There was the dark, square cut garnet my parents gave me for graduation and my high school ring, the tiny emerald with a diamond chip which was the first ring my husband ever gave me and my wedding ring which actually fit my finger 23 years and seven children ago but was misplaced for years after I removed it during a pregnancy that made my hands and feet swell. I found the wedding band in a drawer during our last move, but the others have never been found though I have searched for them and prayed over them (once I knew the name of the patron saint in charge of lost items) and turned couches and car seats upside down and inside out. Despite my best efforts, accompanied sometimes by my tears, most of the rings have remained lost to me. So it seemed doubly strange that I should find this small, insignificant one that I had forgotten about, that I was not even looking for.

It reminded me of wisdom, and how it shows up in unexpected flashes, a bright, silvery gleam that catches the unsuspecting eye. Sometimes I have felt as if all my seeking and praying and crying out for guidance, for wisdom, for enlightenment have been utterly ignored. Like Milton, I have “troubled deaf heaven with my bootless cries,” and come up empty handed. No matter how diligently I seek, how late I burn the midnight oil, how earnestly I hope for the treasure to appear, so often I find nothing.

And then, when I least expect it, when I have forgotten to look or even to care, I stumble upon a treasure, a truth, a comfort, a clue. In an odd place, from a strange source, Truth quietly catches my attention, and I recognize it. God can use anyone, any situation, any old crack in the floor to teach or instruct, comfort or challenge us. He can be silent and unfindable for reasons I do not understand, but He can also show up in unexpected places. I have learned I need to keep my eyes open. All the time.