The Lord of Every Detail

Dave recently started a new sermon series on King Saul from 1 Samuel.  It's about what is means to call someone the Lord and King of you.  The series started with the story of how God providentially brought Saul and Samuel together by orchestrating random events (like some lost donkeys) to make their paths perfectly intersect.  

Then in the girls' group I lead for Delia's class, we read through the entire book of Esther and marveled again over how God controls even things like sleepless nights to bring about His plans.

Our God is the Lord of every detail.  Nothing is too small for Him to care about.  Nothing is outside of His control.  And sometimes He even makes the little things lead to big, huge, miraculous things!  This was a lesson I was blessed to see firsthand this month with the crazy losing and finding of my wedding ring diamond!

In 1998, Dave used his precious, hard-earned college dollars to buy me a beautiful oval diamond, which he gave me on a snowy bridge in Michigan the night he asked me to marry him.  It's priceless to me and my most favorite possession.  So, you can image my heartbreak when I looked down at my finger, while doing recess duty the Friday before Christmas Break, to see my empty ring prongs holding nothing by air.  It was a student pick-up time, so a few parents who learned of my loss were compassionate and amazing and jumped into a major search party of our whole preschool building with me.  One mom dug through my entire classroom garbage can and was ready to start ripping the pipes in our sink apart!  My coworkers were quick to help too.  It was a crazy day, one where I had literally been in every room of the building, so the search was wide and felt a bit hopeless.  How do you find a small diamond in a whole playground of woodchips?

I went home and tore sheets off beds, sifted though the silt of vacuum canisters, and searched every nook and cranny.  Then I just had a good cry about it.  I dug my mom's old wedding ring out of my jewelry box to make my left ring finger feel not-so-naked.  And I started to make peace with the reality that my diamond was gone.  A month went by.

Then one day, back at school, I got distracted by a conversation with a co-worker and didn't have quite as good of an eye on the kids as I normally do during their free play time.  They went wild and dumped every single tub of toys in my classroom out.  It took us a while to clean it all up, but after we did, I looked down and saw my diamond right in the middle of my classroom carpet winking up at me.  "Is that my diamond?!" I yelled in disbelief, while my two co-teachers started screaming, hugging, and jumping up and down with me.  We were a quite a sight for the students, I am sure!  I showed the kids my diamond and thanked them for making the huge mess that found it.  Funny stories from parents came back to me about how this story was retold in their homes that night!

We took my ring to the jeweler, who reset the whole thing and polished it up to a brand-new sparkle.  To give God further credit, we were delighted to realize that the day my ring was ready to be picked up was the exact date Dave had first slipped it on my finger 22 years ago!

It's a real ring-dinger of a story, huh?  I still can't stop admiring my "new" ring, smiling about its failed escape attempt, and thanking God for presiding over the fine points!