WE'D JUST HAD a heavy rain, and I was in the yard picking up debris when I saw it—a shiny, gold circle in the wet ground. I dug it up and found a ring, one my husband had lost. (He had passed away several years earlier.) I cleaned off the ring and wondered if finding it meant there was still something important about my husband for me to think about. For several days I asked God to show me if there was a new idea or some deeper thought I needed to know, but nothing came to me, so I assumed that I had just found a lost ring and put it away.
A few weeks later, I was viewing an online presentation about the permanence of good on The Mother Church lectures site. The talk reminded me that good is also a name for God, and a descriptor of everything about what God is and what God does. After watching this lecture, I was also reminded that the good, the Godlike in our experience, is not derived from material "stuff." I understood that God is Spirit and His good is spiritual, and that God's spiritual qualities stand behind what is good in our lives. Illustrating this point, the speaker/lecturer told a story about a girl who had lost a bracelet that was precious to her. When she recognized that the ideas associated with the bracelet—beauty, the skill of workmanship—couldn't be lost because they were permanent evidence of God in her life, she found the bracelet.
After hearing this story, I instantly remembered finding my husband's ring. Immediately, wonderful, clarifying, and comforting thoughts poured in. First, I could see that the ring itself wasn't significant. It wasn't particularly valuable, nor did my husband or I need it. The significance was in what the ring represented, or symbolized, about God's reality and the permanence of good. Because the ring belonged to my husband, it made me think of him and all the wonderful qualities he expressed, and how grateful I was that we had shared so much together. So here was another affirmation that my husband's identity, the reality of him as God's son, was not limited, but forever intact. That Truth has been an ongoing comfort to me.
