Eight Minute Memoir- Missing

Some things go missing out of neglect while others are missing because of great need.

    When Mark asked me to marry him he reached into his pocket and produced a jewelry case too big to be a ring. As I opened the lid I saw a delicate gold chain with a British Sovereign set in a gold ring. I admit I was just a tad bit disappointed. But I was marrying a non-conventional man. He explained that this coin was purchased years before and it was intended for the woman he would marry. I told my parents that I received a "ring around the collar."

   On our wedding day when the officiator asked him if he had a ring he produced a beautiful star sapphire surrounded with 12 small diamonds. I loved that ring, but somehow, somewhere, it disappeared in the first few years of our marriage. I remembered it was on the kitchen window sill while I did the dishes. I was bereft. I searched even asking Mark to take apart the kitchen drain.

   I still had the "ring around the collar". That phrase came from a laundry stain remover which claimed to remove those unsightly rings on the collar of shirts. Our business failed in the early nineteen eighties. We had no income for many months. My gold coin necklace paid the rent. My missing symbols of commitment are gone but my marriage is intact. There have been new rings and a new necklace. Things that go missing remind us to seek with the expectation of finding. What we find can be of more value than what we lost.

"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?
                                                                Luke 15:8