I recently heard a story about a lost high school ring. A man was using a metal detector in Barbados when he stumbled upon a piece of jewelry that he could tell had been there for a while. The ring was old, and the odds of ever tracking down its owner were miniscule, so most people would have headed to the nearest pawn shop to make a few bucks. But not this man.
Because the ring had the name of the school and the graduation year, he looked up the school and reached out to them. They were able to comb through their records and eventually conclude who it once belonged to.
It turns out the ring had been missing for fifty years. And the owner? They found him and mailed the ring, which arrived the day before his 83rd birthday. When I heard that story on the news it occurred to me that if he lost the ring fifty years earlier, and he was 83, then he was about 33 when he lost it.
You know who wears a high school ring in their 30’s? People who really like their high school ring. Think about how much that ring meant to him, how upset he must have been to lose it, and how relieved he was to finally get it back a half century later.
Someone went through a lot of trouble to reunite a stranger with an old piece of jewelry, and it meant the world to that stranger. The man who lost his ring was completely helpless; he lost it on vacation, and probably thought he would never see it again, or even have the chance to search for it. But then someone found it.
We are like that lost ring, and Jesus is like the man who found it. He said this of Himself in Luke 19:10, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Of course, He meant people and not rings. He came to find us in our lostness. He wants to reunite us with the God who made us, and save us for eternity. Whether you are eight or 83, if He is calling you, receive His free gift today.
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