Has God ever spoken so clearly to you that there’s no mistaking the message, no mistaking it at all? Many people might be tempted to say no, but not Vonnie Gardner.
After one particularly stressful day at school, Vonnie, a second-grade teacher in Savannah, Georgia, was running some last-minute errands. She was at the register at Walmart when she looked down at her left hand. Immediately her blood ran cold. Her ring was missing.
Not just any ring. A diamond cluster ring her husband, Michael, had bought her for their twentieth wedding anniversary, with a stone for each year. It wasn’t even paid for yet—they’d worked out a payment plan with the jeweler.
But the ring was beyond value. Vonnie cherished it as a symbol of the life she and Michael had built together.
Had it fallen off at school or in the car? Was it somewhere in the vast reaches of Walmart? She described the ring to the store manager, the 20 small diamonds, the gold setting, her heart beating with hope. The manager shook his head.
“Ma’am, when someone finds a ring like that, they don’t usually turn it in.”
Vonnie returned to her car, searched it, then slumped in the front seat. Nothing. She called the company that had insured the ring. “The ring was lost?” the agent said. “We only cover it if it’s stolen.”
Vonnie shook her head in despair. Would she and Michael be making payments for years on a ring they no longer had? A ring that represented love and commitment and the intertwining of their hearts? God, you’ve got to find that ring for me. It’s in your hands.
She asked around at work. No one had seen it. She did her best to put it out of her mind. There were tests to grade, books to assign, lessons to plan. The ring was gone. Forever.
Exactly three weeks after it went missing, she and her class were watching the student-produced news program on the school’s closed-circuit TV. “We have a special announcement for Ms. Gardner in first and second grade,” one boy said. “Look what was found yesterday in the school parking lot.”
The camera panned to a close-up of a ring. The beautiful cluster ring Michael gave her. Vonnie screamed out loud. The ring was brought to her; she put it on and felt like she was wearing an answer to prayer. What had been lost was found, what she’d left in God’s hands was on her finger.
Vonnie called her mother in North Carolina and told her the story. “I don’t know how it survived in the parking lot. Three weeks! With all the people coming and going?” she exclaimed. “But I got it back.”
That fall she and Michael were driving home from a football game when her cell phone rang. It was her niece. “Your mom has collapsed,” her niece said, her voice tight. “She’s in the hospital. She had a stroke, a bad one…”
Vonnie immediately flew to North Carolina. By then her mom was in a coma, only tubes, wires and machines keeping her alive. Family members gathered for a vigil. “If she doesn’t wake up in three days, she won’t wake up at all,” the doctor said.
Vonnie wouldn’t move from her mom’s side. She could do nothing but lay her head on the bed and pray, over and over, Please, God, don’t take her away from us. I can’t lose Mom.
It was well into the night, after midnight, that she heard the voice, as sure as anything she’d heard before, the words spoken to her conscious mind: “If I can return a simple ring to you in three weeks, I can surely return your mother to you in three days!”
The ring. She stared at it on her finger, sparkling in the glow of the medical monitors. She’d often wondered about the miracle that brought it back to her. She’d spoken to God then… was he really speaking to her now?
The bedside vigil continued. A death watch, really. One day passed with no change, then another. Vonnie clung to the words that had been spoken to her: I can surely return your mother. Then on the morning of the third day, her mom opened her eyes. Vonnie gently stroked her mom’s cheek and kissed her.
“I knew I’d get you back,” she whispered. “I knew it for sure…” Then one tear and another streamed down her face. “I was promised.”
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