‘Do you think I’m silly?’
Nancy Kennedy
When the phone rings here at the newspaper, you never know who’s on the other end and what the person will say.
That’s why we keep an antacid dispenser in the newsroom. (Not really.)
I remember a call from a woman who sounded greatly distressed.
She apologized for bothering me, but she had lost her wedding rings.
“Do you want me to help look for them?” I asked, a bit confused.
“Oh, goodness no,” she said.
Then she spilled out her story.
It had happened several months before, when she was going through cancer treatment.
“I wasn’t thinking right,” she said. “I was making meatloaf and didn’t want to gum them up, so I took them off.”
Not wanting to leave them on the counter, she put all five rings, her wedding set with a solitaire and two bands welded together and two newer rings, in the pocket of her jeans.
Because her brain was muddled, she forgot about the rings in her pocket and later hung the jeans over a stepladder in her closet and forgot about them.
“I didn’t even notice I wasn’t wearing them,” she said.
Time went by, and she decided to take some things and donate them to a thrift store. Without thinking, she grabbed the jeans along with everything else.
“When I finally noticed I wasn’t wearing my rings, I looked everywhere at least 40 times,” she said. “I was afraid to tell my husband. I kept thinking they’d show up.”
For weeks she cried as she tried to remember where she put them.
Then she cried when she remembered the meatloaf.
She was crying when she called me.
“I didn’t cry when the doctor told me I had cancer, but I’m crying over this,” she said. “Do you think I’m silly?”
I told her no. Those rings meant something to her, something beyond mere jewelry.
Her husband had offered to buy her a new set, but she didn’t want a new set.
She wanted the set she lost, the set she loves.
A week or so earlier my pastor had preached from Luke 15, where Jesus talks about lost sheep, lost coins and a Father waiting for a lost son.
As the woman who lost her rings cried and told me her story, I felt her grief.
“I’m telling myself that maybe someone who doesn’t have anything found them and she’s wearing them and they’re making her happy,” the woman said. “Or someone who needed money for food or medicine. I hope it’s something like that, something from God.”
After we hung up, I wrote the story for the newspaper.
As I wrote, I thought about how God grieves over His lost creation. I thought about Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, longing to gather its people as a hen gathers her young under her wings. (Matthew 23:37)
It’s been more than 10 years since that phone call, but every once in a while I think about it.
I still wonder if the woman ever found her rings. If she did, I imagine her crying tears of joy and thankfulness.
Maybe God cries those kinds of tears.
I think maybe He just might.
Contact Nancy Kennedy at 352-564-2927 (leave a message) or email at nkennedy@chronicleonline.com.
