We were out for our daily walk when DeLaine looked down at her hand and let out a loud gasp. The diamond was gone from her wedding ring! Not knowing the last time she had seen it, the possibilities of where it could be were infinite. Yet we had to go through the futile exercise of trying to figure out where it might have been lost. Did she lose it in the grocery store that morning? Or if it was in the house was it in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room? Was it in the car? Or did it fall out somewhere on the sidewalk that we had now been walking on for 45 minutes?
For the next 15 minutes as we finished our walk home, the normal conversation was replaced by a disbelieving silence. If we lost it outside, we knew it was gone forever. But when we got home we began to comb the house looking for the diamond. I thought about the story in Luke 15:8,9 where the woman lost her coin and swept the house until she found it. But unlike that story there would be no rejoicing that day.
Fast-forward this story to one week later. I was awakened from my Sunday afternoon nap by the sound of breaking glass. I asked DeLaine was she ok. She said she was fine and she proceeded to sweep the glass up from the kitchen floor. A few minutes later she came into the bedroom with a smile on her face and tears in her eyes and said, “Look what I found!”. She had found her diamond! The glass broke in the kitchen on the ceramic tile, but some of the fragments fell onto the carpet in the family room. As she was picking glass fragments out of the carpet she picked up her diamond. As we rejoiced I asked DeLaine what she had broken. I was in awe of her answer and was again reminded of the scripture in Luke 15:8.
“Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?”
The woman in the scripture was sweeping when she found her coin. DeLaine was sweeping when she found her diamond. The woman in the scripture lights a candle. What was it that DeLaine broke? A candle holder! Sometimes when you feel all hope is lost, God has a special way of showing you that He has not forgotten about you. And He often uses seemingly insignificant things to remind us of His faithfulness and return us to His Word for hope and encouragement.
If you’re going through a difficult time in your life and/or your marriage sometimes it seems like all you’re doing is sweeping up the pieces of broken hopes and dreams. Be encouraged and stay strong because in your faithfulness you may be sweeping up something far more valuable that maybe you had given up hope on.
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