Two Lost Rings, One Great Story

Congratulations to this week’s winner of the 2011 One-minute Devotions Page-a-Day Calendar giveaway: Guideposts online user skcollier!

“These types of stories give me goosebumps,” skcollier’s comment read, “but I wish there were more of them.”

Well, consider your wish granted. Here’s another Mysterious Ways story from today’s headlines, found in the Great Falls Tribune:

Six years ago, Nick Welker, a senior at Shelby High School in Montana, was at school preparing a senior prank. He was walking through the parking lot when something shiny caught his eye. He bent down to pick it up. A diamond ring! An impressive-looking one at that.

Nick may have been a prankster, but he was an honest kid. He found out that a teacher had lost her wedding ring—a ring valued at $15,000. He returned it to the teacher in school the next day. She offered him a $5,000 reward. Nick turned it down.

His parents were proud. His grandmother, Norma, was too. But she wished Nick had found a different wedding ring. Her own.

Two years earlier, she’d been arranging flowers cut from her backyard garden, and a phone call distracted her in the middle of tidying up. She didn’t realize until after the garbage had been picked up that she was missing her ring. It wasn’t worth $15,000, but it was worth everything to her. Her husband had passed away years before.

She had searched everywhere, but it must have gone out with the trash. Nick helped someone else get their ring back, but Norma knew she’d never see her own ring again.

This spring, the backyard garden had finally become too difficult to maintain. Norma asked Nick to till it so she could plant grass in its place. Any sign of the garden would be gone.

Nick came over and began to rake the dirt. He bent down to pick up a soda can tab.

But it wasn’t a soda can tab.

On his grandmother’s 80^th birthday, Nick gave his grandmother a very special present... her lost ring, shined up as good as new.

Does Nick Welker just have a metal detector in his head? Or did someone lead him right where he needed to be?

Why are things lost for a while, and found years later? I get one possible answer from Teresa Dezendorf’s story, Mom’s Ring. Sometimes, something is lost until its really needed again.

Norma and Nick’s story also reminds me of other Mysterious Ways stories about people who got a little help finding the beloved things they’d lost. Like the man looking for his family’s special bible. Or Lorraine Arents losing her father’s dog tags in a mugging.

Do you have a favorite lost and found story? Or one of your own?

Leave a comment below to enter this week’s giveaway. Once again, we’ll be giving away the 2010 His Mysterious Ways collection, with more than 100 true stories showing God’s love and God’s hand in our lives.