When I turned 14, my parents gave me an unexpected birthday gift. A little gold ring with an oval-cut ruby in the center with two little diamond chips on either side. With the exception of a string of pearls I remember wearing in my third grade school photo with a cable-knit sweater and plaid skort (my father's influence) , it's the only piece of jewelry I remember my parents giving me. They explained that the ruby signified my relationship with Christ and His sacrifice for me, and the two diamonds were to represent me and my future husband. The ring was meant to be worn on my left hand, a placeholder on my finger until someone some day replaces it with another.
It's a little corny, maybe, but it's become a significant symbol in my life. Once a simple purity ring, not unlike the ones that many of my high school peers wore after a True Love Waits seminar in youth group meetings - it's taken on a much greater meaning. This isn't just about purity, or romance, or my future husband. It's a constant reminder that I'm married first to Christ. He's my Beloved. And so His desires should be my desires, and I dare not be an unfaithful, wandering bride. I think that even one day when its place might be taken by another ring - and another covenanted symbol - I'll keep it close by. Hard to think of letting it go - even after it's served its intended purpose.
My freshman year of high school, I took a ceramics class. One afternoon, in a moment of carelessness, I'd taken off my ring to make sure it didn't get clay all over it and set it somewhere I assumed it would be safe. A day or two later, I realized I couldn't remember where that safe place was. For a few months, I couldn't find my ring anywhere. It became an issue of intense anxiety - some irrational fear about having lost my virtue or some other such nonsense. But I couldn't find it anywhere. Finally, it appeared. Nestled atop a pile of fresh laundry, no one in my family could account for where it had been or how it had returned to me. I chalked it up to an angel working some sneaky divine miracle.
Last weekend, somewhere between showering and preparing dinner and perhaps a few other possibilities for why I might have taken off my ring, I lost it once again. I searched everywhere, trying to remember where I had last seen it and what I'd been doing. I kept checking the usual places - my bedside table, the bathroom sink, a spot on my bookshelf - as well as other unusual locations, but it was nowhere to be found.
This Friday is my birthday. I turn 24 this year. So it will be the tenth anniversary of the year my parents gave me that ring. Ten years of a covenanted, though imperfect, season of commitment to honoring the Lord in my relationships, with my heart, and in how I live my life. A decade of feeling naked when it's not on my finger - a constant reminder of the promise I'd been offered and that I'd made at 14. Somehow the loss of that ring during this particular week seemed even greater.
Friday morning, a week before my big day, it came back to me. Underneath a stack of shirts just laundered by our house helper and left in my bedroom, it appeared again. But in my delight in finding it once again, there was still a sweet reminder that no object, no matter how symbolic and significant, bears that promise itself. That ring itself is made of precious metals and stones that will one day, like everything else in this world, fade away. The object is merely a reminder. It's only God and people and the relationships between the two that ultimately matter. We're the only "lost things" that God cares about. And He'll keep seeking us out until we make the decision to find Him in return.
May the lost things in your life be recovered today - but more importantly, may the Lost of the world find the one who desperately desires us to be Found.
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