The Rings Around my Heart

It started with the mother's ring on my right hand. Three birthstones set in a row on a band, one for each of my sons, it was a piece of jewelry I treasured almost as much as the boys themselves. I looked down at it at work one day and suddenly noticed one of the stones was missing! Horrified, when I got home that evening I worked the ring off my finger (over these knuckles? No small feat!) and hid it carefully away before telling my family about my loss. I knew instinctively (and correctly!) that the moment my sons heard about it they would rally to find it and figure out which of the three of them was on the “outs” with his mother while the other two were still secure in their standing! For once the merciless teasing was forstalled by my advance planning!

My husband kindly had the ring repaired for me, and a couple of months passed without incident. Then again while at work one day I happened to look down at my hands, and this time it was the band on my engagement ring that had split completely through!

“Are you kidding me?” I muttered to myself. Worn thin after 35 years of life and love and laughter with my husband, it had simply given way. Because the engagement ring was welded to the wedding band, I had to remove the entire set (another miracle!) and took it in for repair at the first opportunity. I chuckled when the jewelry store said they would call with a price estimate on the repair. I knew I'd pay any amount to get it fixed; the rings were simply priceless to me.

Yet the empty feeling on my left hand bothered me, so I dug in my jewelry box for something to wear in my wedding bands' place. I found a ring with a tiger's eye in a simple setting, a piece of jewelry I'd had so long that I couldn't even remember where I got it but liked it enough to keep it all these years. Gladly I worked it onto my finger and was happy to have it till my wedding set was restored to me. It lasted a full week before I happened to notice while again scanning groceries one day that that stone had likewise disappeared, leaving an empty setting behind!

What was it about weighing bunches of kale on a scale and sliding boxes of cereal down a belt that was so hard on my rings, I wondered? It didn't make sense that after eleven years on the job I suddenly couldn't keep a ring on my finger to save my life! It was such a strange occurrence of events that surely there was some message attached to it, one that I clearly wasn't receiving. “I hope I figure it out soon,” I thought to myself. “I don't know how many rings I have left!”

Suddenly, there it was! I don't know how many rings I have left.

The former forester in me remembered that the age of a tree is measured in the growth rings that are visible in a crosscut of the trunk, a ring for every year of life. How many “rings” do each of us have left? We simply don't know.

It's possible to determine a tree's age without cutting it down; foresters carry a tool called an increment borer which removes a core sample from the trees on which the rings are clearly visible and easily counted. But the sample reveals more than just the tree's age. It shows growth patterns in the life of the tree, years in which the tree grew well as well as those in which growth was stunted for some reason by environmental conditions or disease.

We Christians carry a similar tool in our pockets in the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is the mercy of God that before our lives are cut down He gives us the means to examine our past, evaluate our growth and consider problem areas in our relationships with Him and the people around us...while there is still time to correct them! Sometimes He just needs to get our attention.

My ring situation did that for me. The mother's ring reminded me of my joy in my boys, prompting me to keep them close in heart in specific ways and deliberately clear my schedule when the opportunity presents itself for us to get together. Similarly, a marriage can't survive if the joy of the engagement and early years is lost in life's busyness; scheduled fun times with a spouse is a marital must. And who among us doesn't have treasured friends whose faithful love should be remembered, renewed and rekindled with a deliberate effort to stay in touch?

It's interesting that the losses all became apparent to me while I was at work. It's easy to slip into the habit of letting our work situations run our lives and control our time. We can be still mentally clocked in even when completely off the job site, our minds still thinking about problems we encountered and working out solutions when they should be focused on thoughts and people closer to home. It can lead to an undiagnosed type of “attention deficit disorder” which, if left untreated, can prove to be fatal to the relationshps we value the most.

So what can we do about it? There's no oral medication we can take to instantly fix relationshps that have lost their luster. I had to send my rings in to be repaired, a good reminder that we can't fix all of our problems ourselves; we simply need to ask for help from the One who has all the answers. Maybe the Good Doctor will first prescribe a new set of eyeglasses through which we view our life and the people in it. Then He'll work on our heart to get the love flowing freely in all the right directions once more. He'll renew our mind and readjust our priorities so that the most important things...and people...in our lives get our attention first. Perhaps the best treatment is simply to give us a glimpse of the brevity of life, to remind us that we simply don't know how much time we have left. If change is to occur, it has to begin now...today.

Whether or not my jewelry will be repaired in time for Valentine's Day, this year I'll be thanking God for the gift of three broken rings that redirected my love and attention to those in my inner circle...while there is yet time to hold them close.

“whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.”

(James 4:14 NKJV)

Victory on Valentine's Day

I could place her face; it was her name I couldn‘t come up with. But then rarely do I know the names of the people I meet over the checkout lane of the grocery store until a friendship has been firmly established between us. Yet she chatted merrily on, mentioning in the same tone she’d just used to discuss the weather we’d been having lately that she was going through a divorce.

I stopped scanning her groceries for a moment and looked at her. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“Oh, I’m fine. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” she asserted. “And I don’t need that in a bag…” she said, reaching to grab the bottle of vodka I’d just set down and putting it directly into her purse. The action caused me to wonder if she was really as fine about it all as she claimed, especially when I saw her the next day, the one after that, and the one following that as well, doing exactly the same thing. Some days she came through my line, on others I just happened to look up and spot her in another checkout lane just in time to see her stash the bottle in her handbag. Perhaps these days before Valentine‘s Day were tough ones for her in her current situation, and the liquor was just her pain medication of choice.

That thought prompted mental visions of another friend for whom this particular holiday was also especially difficult this year. A coworker who looks too young to have already been married two years, she’s an army wife whose husband has been deployed overseas for the past eight months. The separation has been hard on them both, and they are eagerly counting down the days till their reunion sometime this spring.

I asked her recently how she made it through the holiday season just past. She told me that Thanksgiving and Christmas weren’t so bad, perhaps because she had lots of family around, but that New Year’s hit her hard, as she and her soldier had always been together before this to share a New Year’s Eve kiss. And now Valentine’s Day loomed on the horizon, and she hoped she’d be scheduled off that day so she wouldn’t have to see people buying flowers and candy for the love of their lives, while hers was still so far away.

Imagine her disappointment then when the work schedule came out for the week of Valentine’s Day, and not only was she scheduled to work on the holiday, but she was placed in the floral department all week long! With cashier hours in short supply at the start of the year and the floral department needing extra help to handle the Valentine’s Day demand, she’d been given hours there in order to meet the need and fill out her paycheck at the same time. Grateful for work though she was, the action rubbed salt into a wound that was already raw and bleeding.

Surprisingly, she, too, found solace for her pain in something she carried in a bag…not a handbag, but a shopping bag that she filled with gifts for her friends and coworkers. By day she took orders, carried fresh blooms from the cooler and cashed out customers making purchases, and then she spent her off hours tying personally-addressed Valentines on to the stems of cloth flowers, depositing them in the pink carry-all until it was packed full. A day or two before the holiday she started delivering them with a smile, an occasional hug, and a warm wish for each. Using some tips from a regular in the department she also put together an arrangement of fresh flowers for the mother who supports her in so many ways in her husband’s absence. She simply spread joy wherever she went that week.

Her actions seemed to inspire the same in her coworkers, who were soon passing out mini-bouquets, frosted cupcakes, or buying little remembrances for any possibly lonely soul who came to their minds. And not surprisingly, the love she gave away came back to her in the form of flowers from friends, a greatly anticipated gift from her hubby, and the thoughtful appreciation of the many people who were blessed by her actions. She simply took the pain she was feeling and turned it into gain somehow for everyone around her, and found victory on the very Valentine’s Day she’d been dreading as a result.

The Bible warns that in this life we will have tribulation; each of us will face troubling situations that break our hearts and threaten to wear us down physically and emotionally. It’s what we do with that trouble that counts. So often we stay so consumed with getting through the matter ourselves that we don’t even see the suffering of those that surround us. We feel we have nothing at that point to give to anybody else, anyway. Yet God urges us to use the very thing that threatens to destroy us as a tool to help the person struggling beside us get a leg up on their own situation. In doing so we find that we are gradually lifted out of our own pit of despair as well.

We need to remember that we don’t fight our battles alone; God sends visible reminders of hope and the victory He promises if we just have eyes to see them. Perhaps it was just one such messenger who suddenly appeared before my friend in the floral shop a day or two before the holiday, a man dressed in army fatigues, presumably from the nearby recruitment center, there to buy flowers for his girl. She told me later that she was surprised she didn’t break down at the sight of him. Yet I believe he was really sent there on a mission to deliver a gift…his presence perhaps a heavenly reminder that sooner than she thinks, her own soldier will come walking home to her. On that day she will cry…but they will be tears of joy.

“…for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap…And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all…”
(Galatians 6:7,9-10 NKJV)