An Inspiring Story About Faith - My Mom's Lost Ring

Accepting the things that happen to you in your life with grace and wisdom is a worthy goal. While we get into challenging situations often which test both grace and wisdom, the goal is to act and react gracefully as much as possible. It strengthens our character to see through to the essence of situations and react to the essence rather than to all the circumstances that lead up to and after it. Remember what’s important.

Here’s an example: I was exasperated with my older brother who has high functioning autism and called my mother to vent about it. In an
ego based rant making myself into the victim for having tried to help him and failed I told my Mom that I just gave up on the situation. I was tired and frustrated. Her voice sounded hollow and frail on the phone which I assumed was due
to the nature of the conversation. She choked back some tears and a few sentences about what was going on. It was something to the effect of: “It’s just that I’ve had something upsetting happen, I lost the ring that Daddy gave me.”
My heart sank. I felt terrible for being so self-righteous and indignant at the start of the call.

Let me tell you about the ring. I frequently joke that my family heirlooms are plastic. My parents grew up poor and over the years, as a family we were comfortable but didn’t have a lot of things which would be considered luxuries:
jewelry, family vacations, china, fancy cars, etc. My father went on a trip to Italy with my aunts one year and brought my Mother an opal ring. It was her favorite stone. She cherished that ring because it was one of the nicest things she
ever had and represented my Dad’s love for her. They had a tumultuous relationship but a deep love for each other. He died in 1980 after a grueling battle with cancer in which he aged 40 years in a year. He was 53 when he died but looked 90, fairly horrifying by anyone’s standards.

Over the years, the ring became impossible for my Mom to wear because of her arthritis. She couldn’t get it over her swollen knuckles. Some time in the early 1990’s I found out about a process where a jeweler could cut the band on the ring and add a clasp which allowed the ring to open up to 3 sizes bigger than it normally was. That allowed you to slip it over a swollen knuckle and close the clasp. We had the ring fitted with the clasp and my Mom could wear it again
which thrilled her. She took great pride in the frequent compliments she got on that ring.

She had lost some weight and wore the ring to work on a different finger that she usually did. At some point during her shift the ring slipped off and she realized it the following day. She was sick about it after having tried to find it
with no luck. At the point when I talked to her she was trying to come to grips with never seeing it again. When we lose something we love, we grieve. It seems silly to us sometimes, the level of emotion we have over things that we
lose that may not have a high monetary value, but worth is not about what something costs...it’s about meaning in our lives.

When I hung up the phone I decided to go look for the ring at my Mom’s work. She was working at the Burlington Coat Factory Department store at the time in the Youth Dept. The Youth Dept. was huge and jam packed with clothes, toys, racks and tables. It was always a mess even when someone was working in it because of the volume of merchandise. I started row by row crawling on the floor to see if I could find the ring underneath all the clothes. I’ve found over the years that if you look straight down, you often miss things, but it you put your ear on the floor and look sideways, you find things you’ve dropped. As I worked my way through the dept. I tried not to panic. I was amazed that no one asked me what I was doing. At one point I encountered one of my Mom’s co-workers who didn’t
understand English very well and tried to explain what I was doing. She didn’t seem to understand but she didn’t try to stop me either.

When I got to the last row and hadn’t found the ring the thought occurred to me that it might have fallen into the pocket of a garment as my Mom was hanging or rearranging clothes. I briefly started feeling around in the pockets of
some of the coats and larger garments but quickly abandoned that route because there were at least 20,000 pieces of clothing in that department and the attempt seemed futile. I stood by a shallow table with had sides on it which had
some baseball caps stacked on it. Pondering the next step I thought that I might take out an add in the newspaper lost and found although deep in my heart I didn’t feel that there was a good chance someone would see it. But I didn’t want to give up.

At a moment of despondency I actually thought: There cannot be a God. This is just too cruel. That ring meant as much to my Mom as life itself and now it’s gone. My hand was on the edge of the table ridge and at the exact moment that I had that thought, I cast my eyes downward in desperation. The next thing I saw, was the ring, in the front part of the table where you could only see it if you were looking straight above it, not from an angle. I was astonished. I was
astonished as much by the fact that I found the ring as the thought which had preceded it.

I called my Mom and now I was choking back tears. I said: “Mom, I found the ring!” She started sobbing and said: “Oh my God, I never thought I was going to see it again. Thank you, God bless you!” My Mom is not a religious person and I can’t recall her ever saying: God bless you. That seeming coincidence was not lost on me. I brought the ring over to her.

Later on she told me that when she realized she lost the ring that she was going to give up but thought of me. She thought: Maryellen wouldn’t give up so I’m going to look for it. In the day between she lost the ring and I found it she imagined someone picking up the ring and keeping it for themselves feeling lucky that they had found something beautiful. I choose to believe that most people would look at a ring like my Mother’s, realize that losing it would be a great loss and would turn it in to the Lost and Found. But if ever an experience taught me about faith, it was certainly this one.