Me: You look comfortable.
Prodigal: I am very comfortable.
Me: I will tell a story but don’t fall asleep til the end.
Prodigal: I won’t!
This is from the book Small Miracles for Women by Yitta Halberstam & Judith Leventhal
Everybody who knew Hazel Davis knew about her rings. There were four–all beautiful diamonds given to her by her late husband for anniversaries and birthdays.
I’m starved,” Irma said, pulling into a Cracker Barrel parking lot. The women were going to Virginia to visit Hazel’s mom and had traveled 100 miles from their North Carolina homes.
As Hazel scanned the menu, she reached into her pocket–and felt only a hole!
“Irma!” she choked.
The women scoured the parking lot and the van–in vain. As they drove along Route 40, Irma tried to console her friend.
But tears ran down Hazel’s face. “I bet someone saw them and realized they were valuable,” Hazel cried.
Little did she know how right she was. Minutes after Hazel and Irma left, the Reverend Jim Diehl and his wife Karen pulled into the Cracker Barrel on their way home from a trip with their boys. When they saw something glinting in the sun, they stopped–and found themselves staring at diamonds!
These mean a lot to someone, Karen knew, looking at the ring from Jim she wore on her left hand. “We have to find the owner,” she said.
Over the next week, they spoke with the restaurant and police, hoping someone had reported them missing. But Hazel hadn’t. She was too upset and shaken that day to think straight and had left without notifying the restaurant of her loss. And once home, she figured whoever had found the rings had probably kept them.
The Diehls had indeed kept the rings–in a safe deposit box.
Five weeks later, Jim was at a hospital visiting a congregation member and his wife Linda. While chatting, Linda mentioned that her mother’s friend had lost some valuable rings in a parking lot. Jim was shaken. It can’t be, he told himself. He had found the rings 100 miles away. Yet he had to ask where the woman had lost them.
“At a Cracker Barrel in Statesville,” Linda replied.
It seemed unbelievable, even to a man in the miracle business. But he asked for the woman’s number.
When her phone rang and Jim’s wife Karen gave her the news, Hazel wept with joy. And when she learned that her good Samaritans lived only miles away, she had to laugh.
“It’s a miracle,” she told the Diehls when they delivered her rings. “It just goes to prove that there are amazing, lovely people out there.”
2 Timonthy 4:14
But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and firmly believe, knowing of whom thou hast learned them;
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
