This past weekend we had some friends visiting our family from out of town. They wanted to take a trip out to the coast, and we decided to join them. Before we left on our trip, we prayed for God to have preeminence in the day. We arrived early afternoon and me and my brother set up a sun shelter for our visitors. Afterward, we decided to throw the football around with the kids in the water. As we were out in the water playing, we had slowly drifted about 100 yards off shore. By this time we were in about four feet of water.
My brother threw me the ball, and as I went up to catch it, the ball hit my wedding ring. My wedding ring popped off and hit my shoulder and fell into the ocean. Immediately I was in disbelief as I had forgotten to take it off, and I could not believe what just happened. I tried not to move, and I desperately called my brother over to help me look. We spent the next hour with water up to our neck searching blindly for my ring. The water was murky and as we searched it seemed the waves started kicking up more and more sand, making it practically impossible to see and burying the seafloor with more and more sand. As I searched, I said a prayer in my heart as I remembered reading a testimony about ‘The Little Things,’ where a brother found his wedding ring after six months of it being lost. I prayed in my heart, “Lord if you did it for them, you can do it for me. Just once more, Lord.” The enemy is quick to step in with his two cents, but I wanted to take God at his Word. I knew I couldn’t keep searching and I left it in the Lord’s hands.
Immediately, thoughts started to rush in that I’d never find it. I blamed myself for being careless, and doubt tried to creep in and rob me of taking God at His Word. But just as quickly as those thoughts came, I was inspired to think HOW the Lord would give me back my ring. Would I find it in the mouth of a fish? Would it wash up onshore? Would the ocean recede all the way out to where I would find it atop the sand? For the next few hours, I waded out from time to time just to see if, by chance, I’d catch a glimmer of it through the water. I even borrowed someone’s goggles to see if I could see through the water but it was no use. At this point I had lost the spot where it had fallen. Suddenly, I glanced to my right, and there was a man who had come out into the water with a metal detector. I had not seen this man before, and it seemed as though he appeared out of nowhere.
I walked over to him and asked him whether he could pick up gold with that metal detector as I had lost my ring. He told me unless I had stayed in the very spot I dropped the ring, he would never find it since the metal detector does not have a wide range. He said it was lost. I thanked him and walked away to look some more. It seemed but just a few minutes that he slowly meandered over to where I was and asked me to describe my ring. I described it to him, and he said, "JUST IN CASE." No more than three minutes since had he asked me this when he asked me to describe it again. As I did, he held up his hand and showed me my ring. PRAISE THE LORD! I ran with the ring all the way to shore to testify to our group what God had done for me.
God gave me my testimony right there! Faith is beyond hope, friends.
God Bless You.
Brother Rod
USA