Toward the end of her life Diana's mother, a cancer patient, was quite frail. One late summer day, Diana decided to take her to a street festival at Oaks Park. As Diana pushed her mother's wheelchair along, the two women looked at the wide variety of merchandise displayed. At one point they came across some vendors selling items from Finland. Diana's mother was Finnish and quite delighted to meet people who shared a common language. She ended up buying an amethyst ring set in silver, imported from Finland. The asking price was $20. "Mother offered $15, and the offer was accepted, which gave her quite a bit of happiness as Mother always liked to 'make a deal'," Diana says. "She loved that ring and wore it continuously on her right hand."
One day Diana had a doctor's appointment and brought her mother along. It was sometime later that they realized her mother's ring was gone. "We thought it had come off when she washed her hands in the restroom," Diana says. That seemed the only realistic possibility, but the ring had not been turned in by anyone at the medical center. "We both looked in the car, on the floor, in her apartment, just everywhere," Diana says. "Several times we looked and ran our hands through the side-pocket of the car door as Mother liked to keep Kleenex there. The side-pocket was always empty, even of the usual Kleenex." They didn't find the ring.
Sometime later, Diana took her mother on a grocery shopping trip. She was growing weaker now, and Diana treasured their time together. As Diana wheeled her to the car the sun was setting. "As I opened the front car door to assist my mother from the wheelchair, a ray of light from the setting sun cast itself on the side-pocket of the car door," Diana says. "I could not believe what I saw. It was the amethyst ring! As I took it out and presented it to my mother, we were both completely silent--in thanksgiving and in awe."
Why would God and his angels be interested in returning an ordinary ring to two ordinary women? Perhaps, since Diana's mother was approaching the end of her life, the ring was meant as a sign of hope, a promise that he had not forgotten them and would be near them always.
When Barbara Zabielski's mother died ten years ago, Barbara inherited her wedding ring. Eventually Barbara's own rings became too small for her, and recently she began wearing her mother's ring instead. One day she visited her doctor to get an injection in her hand, and she took off the ring while receiving the treatment. "I thought I put it in my pocket, but when I got home, it wasn't there," Barbara says. "I was very upset, so I went back to the doctor's office to see if it had possibly dropped out of my pocket." No success. No one had seen the ring.
Barbara searched her house inch by inch, to no avail. The ring was certainly outside, probably lying in a parking lot or a sidewalk. She would never find it. So she prayed that whoever did find it would love and cherish it as much as she did.
About two weeks later, Barbara was in the basement when she heard a noise. It was a bird, flying around the room! How had it gotten into her house and into the basement? "I tried to catch it, and then I called my husband," Barbara says. "He was astonished, but we finally got the bird to go upstairs." Following it, they got to the first floor and realized that the bird had disappeared. Where had it gone?
Barbara began looking around. "I even started moving things, just in case the bird was caught somewhere," she says. And when she moved the coffee table, there was her mother's ring.
"I had vacuumed right there earlier in the week," Barbara says. She is sure that the ring was not there then. Nor did she ever find the bird, but she believes that God's little creature was actually her guardian angel. And why not?
