Lord of the Ring

It was Sunday, October 29, 2017, in High Point, North Carolina. I had pulled in my parents' driveway on my way home from church, as I often did in those days. Somehow their sweet spirits lingered in their house among all their precious things, even though my father had passed away at the end of June and my mother had died a week before Christmas in 2016. Losing them six months apart had taken a toll I was not capable of comprehending at that time. My own health had broken in the process, and I had ended up in the emergency room three times that summer with debilitating vertigo, uncontrollable vomiting and dehydration, and abnormal blood work, subsequent to sudden hearing loss in my right ear a few days before my father died. I didn't know then that I would be pronounced permanently deaf in that ear. I had always had almost supersonic hearing, which was a tremendous advantage in the classroom. I would tease that I could hear everything my students whispered in the back of the room. And I really could. I just thought I had a bubble in my ear from some severe, stress-related virus. I would find out a little over a year later that I was suffering from Lyme's disease.

That Sunday as I pulled into the slight downward slope of their driveway towards their modest brick home with its gracious half-acre setting less than a mile from our church, I was shocked to discover that a battery charger had been hooked up to their Buick in the carport. With a jolt, I realized that that could mean only one thing: someone had obtained a key. With confusion and sinking dread, I walked up the wheelchair ramp that led to their back door. It was unlocked. A wall of evil seemed to rise up before me as I entered the kitchen. Almost as quickly, I rushed out of the house. Their own belongings trashed the floor, and I could tell from what I glimpsed in the sunroom that the entire house had been "thrashed." Fear shook my already weakened, unstable body. I had only a few weeks before made any significant progress in learning how to balance myself again without the orientation of my right ear. I called a friend of our family, a big six-foot-four man who often helped my father and who also had kept their lawn immaculate after their passing. Another friend of ours soon arrived also, and together we reentered the house as they shook their heads in disgust.

I also called the police, not because it would do any good but because it just seemed like the right thing to do. Never again will I make the mistake of allowing them to dust for fingerprints. The black powder ruined the carpet in the sunroom, stuck like paint to the pecan wood cupboards, and just created more illusion of chaos than was already there, if that was even possible. One thing I did learn from this otherwise futile encounter: the cute little 1940's log cabin right next door was a known drug house. I found out later (I lived seven minutes away on the other end of town) that a SWAT team had raided the house not long before. Chills ran through me as my mind flashed back to how many times I had driven over there after dark just to check things out and, yes, to linger and to remember as I sat in my father's maroon recliner and stared at his treasured library. Somehow, as I prayed in his study at that chair, sometimes kneeling but more often sitting, I felt him near me in all his quiet, godly devotion.

After the fear subsided, all I felt was an elation of gratitude that no one could hurt my beloved parents now. There was not a doubt in my mind that they were both safe in the arms of Jesus where no thief could steal their peace. It also began to dawn on me that the Lord had protected me just that Friday, when I had planned to stop by their house in the evening. Not only was I exhausted after a week of teaching, I somehow felt as if a restraining Hand had held me at bay. Now I understood. I could easily have walked in on the thieves. It became apparent in the police search that these thugs had kicked in the heavy wooden back door to the sunroom. It felt to me that there must have been at least four people at work. Each room bore a slightly different pattern of devastation. I couldn't even clearly remember what was missing since I could barely see the floor in the large sunroom, in my father's study, or in my parents' bedroom.

My father's study was by far the worst, with every desk drawer dumped out, files scattered, and books pulled off the shelves. My father's safe was gone. His gray metal cashbox was gone. His great-grandfather's heirloom Colt revolver from Civil War days was gone. To this day, I don't even know what else was gone. Their bedroom told the same story. My great-grandmother's Bible, of all things, had been stolen, and on and on it went. My parents' queen-sized bed was torn apart with the mattress slashed, drawers had been dumped out everywhere, and my mother's jewelry box was missing (all except one small drawer, which I kept). A few of her vintage broaches still lay on her dresser but not much else, not that she had much to begin with, just those delicate, dainty things that sometimes graced an outfit. My mother wasn't one for wearing much outward adornment. She didn't need to, in my opinion. Her beauty did not come in a tube or in a box. Her ring. Where was her wedding ring?

I knew where my father's wedding ring was because he took it off a few weeks before he died when I was visiting him at Shannon Gray Nursing Home. It was in the coin pocket of my wallet, safe and secure. My parents had simple matching gold bands, an "extravagance" of their later years when they moved to Florida and my father reentered the field of teaching for a while. I always thought my father was one of the handsomest men I ever knew, and, apparently, I was not alone in my opinion. In self-defense, he had finally succumbed to buying himself a wedding ring when he was surrounded by a beehive (perhaps a bit overstated) of shameless females. Not a flirt of any kind, my father made his statement with a ring. As a pastor in the Wesleyan holiness tradition, he had never owned one. Rings were frowned upon for various rather vague reasons, but the taboo itself was anything but vague. But times had changed, and it was a practical necessity, not an ungodly adornment.

Just a few days before the break in, I had prayed with a significant degree of anxiety that the Lord would help me to remember what I had done with my mother's ring. I couldn't think where it was because the days before and after her quite sudden death were a blur, and so much had happened since then that I felt a strong misgiving that I might have misplaced it. I didn't know at the time that Lyme's disease also often took advantage of my body and gifted me with chronic brain fog. But I had prayed that the Lord would help me find her ring and that it would not be lost. Where it was now I had no idea as I stared, stunned, at my parents' ravaged house.

My sister and brother-in-law drove up from Morristown, Tennessee that week to help me come to grips with this awful mess. It would have taken me weeks to reorganize everything, and we had to get the house presentable at some point even to sell it. I was the executor of their estate, and the very thought of facing all that responsibility was traumatic in itself. When they arrived, we each tackled a room. Strangely, the living room had not been touched, but the other rooms were an absolute disaster, and I started tackling the enormous sunroom that opened off the kitchen and dining room. My brother-in-law worked on the chaos in the study, and my sister sorted through my parents' savagely disarrayed bedroom. As people do in times of shock and stress, we talked and worked, sharing discoveries and miseries from room to room.

At the moment, I was in the kitchen, trying to visualize what used to sit on my mother's counter. The cherry-red KitchenAid mixer I had bought her was missing, the silverware set from her wedding shower was gone, and on and on. There simply was no way to absorb what had happened to this sacred home where prayer had been the daily air my parents breathed and where visitors left amazed at the unusual atmosphere of peace. This was such a devilish mockery I couldn't understand it. Then my sister walked straight towards me through the dining room of this ranch-style home with her closed palm outstretched as if to summon mine. With a look of exalted satisfaction, she didn't need to say a word: she dropped my mother's wedding ring in my hand.

Then it all came back to me. At the funeral home, the undertaker had put my mother's glasses and wedding ring in a small velvet drawstring bag. This little maroon bag had sat since December--not quite a year--in the larger maroon canvas bag into which we had put some of her personal items, including her funeral guestbook and service bulletin. I had set this bag on the floor of her closet and hadn't touched it since, even though I had given one of her friends some of her best clothes only the week before--finding myself finally ready even to think about parting with anything that belonged to her. No wonder I hadn't clearly remembered what I had done with her ring. My spirit had sensed all along that that was an unwise place to keep it.

My sister had found the ring on the floor underneath all the stuff that had been dumped in my parents' bedroom. The large canvas bag was gone and so was the small velvet bag. "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their righteousness is of me, saith the LORD" (Isaiah 54:17). The Lord dropped this verse like a flashcard into my mind at that moment. This had been one of four promises the Lord had divinely given to my mother and to me during her near-death saga three years before. For that ring to have been on the floor under all that rubble, that meant that it had fallen out of two bags--the larger canvas bag, which was understandable, and the hand-sized drawstring bag, which was remarkable. How that happened, when the thieves made off with the bags themselves, I will never know--except that the angels were there.

And except that, like the symbol of promise I thought we had lost, the Lord kept His promise to us, proving Himself always--the Lord of the ring.