See the awesome glass gemstone I’m holding in the picture at the top of today’s article? It’s very, very cool. A friend brought it to our house for a playdate, and the kids decided it would be VERY FUN for one person to hide the gemstone so that the others could try to find it. They played this game happily until…

Yep.

The gemstone got lost. One of my boys hid the stone and forgot where he put it. We searched. We retraced our steps. We tried to think, think, think, where could it be? We did NOT find it. 

Our friend had to leave our house without his sparkly toy, and it was SAD. We pinky promised to look hard every day until we found it. 

We looked and looked and looked. Nothing. (We bought a replacement gemstone for our friend because we’d utterly failed.)

One month later, I was homeschooling one of my boys, and he dropped a math block under the bed. He crept into that dark, creepy space to search, and—hooray!!!! He found the math block AND the long-lost red gemstone!

We rejoiced like the shepherd who found his one lost lamb. Or the woman who found the lost coin. We were so excited to return the toy to our friend. 

Until…

Yep.

We lost the gemstone—again! This time, I was determined to find it! 

Being the mom, I did a visual sweep of the entire house, quickly looking in all the usual spots. No success, so I tried a few not-so usual spots. Then, I enlisted my boys to search their bedroom top to bottom. They tore it apart and found NO gemstone. With great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, we put the boys’ bedroom back together, and I told them to run around the house and look in all of the places I’d already looked. They found nothing.

Finally, I said, “There’s one thing we haven’t tried.”

“What, Mom?”

“We haven’t tried praying,” I said. 

We knelt down, and I said a very short prayer asking God to please help us find the gemstone because we love our friend and want to return his toy. When we were done, I said, “Now we just have to wait and see how God answers us.”

After the prayer, I sat my boys down for some lunch. While they were eating, I thought to myself, I’m going to check the bin over by the wood-burning stove, the one with a few games and puzzles inside. It’s in a dark corner, and maybe the gemstone fell to the very bottom, and the boys and I just didn’t see it. 

I walked over to the bin, and what did I see? 

The gemstone was sitting on the very top of all the stuff in the bin. The top! How could we have missed it on the top?!

I grabbed it and ran back to my boys and said, “Look! Look what happens when you pray!”

I hope this small testimony—a small seed, indeed—germinates in my kids’ hearts and produces good fruit in years to come. I am so thankful to God for showing them just a fraction of His great power that day. 

This article has undergone ministry review and approval.