Lost and Found

The Lord knows where everything is.

The first story I remember hearing about how God knows where everything is, and cares, was a story my grandmother told about her wedding ring.  She was washing the dishes when it slipped off of her finger and went down the drain. My grandmother was alarmed, and broken hearted. She cried out to my grandfather who immediately opened the U-shaped trap under the sink to retrieve her ring, but it wasn’t there. My grandparents had been retired from the mission fields in China for a number of years. They led a quiet, peaceful life in Blaine, Washington. My grandmother’s ring was her only jewelry. My grandfather had given it to her in 1916.

In her lighthearted way, she grieved the loss, but knew that ultimately it didn’t matter. It was just part of the stuff that she would leave behind, eventually. But the Lord heard the cry of her heart. Sometime later she accidentally knocked the little box she kept on her dresser off on the floor. The back of the box broke off the box, and there on the floor amidst the broken pieces was her ring!

She wore it until she passed away in 1977. My mother had the diamond reset in a mounting that would protect it, and when my mother passed away in 2018, that ring came to me.  

I took this picture of it today, August 12, 2025. By the way, my hand looks a lot like my grandmother’s hand. I remember tracing the raised blood vessels on her hands that looked just like mine.

Another grandmother in our family lost the diamond out of her ring while walking on an unpaved road in Wrangell, Alaska. Again, the diamond was her only treasure. To try to comfort her, her husband walked the road into town again looking for the diamond. He did not find it, but when he got home he put his feet up on a foot stool. From the other side of the room Grandma saw something glitter from the bottom of his shoe!  Yes, her diamond was stuck to the sole of his shoe. That diamond ended up in ring for one of her granddaughters.

How many times have I lost something, like my keys or my phone, and asked the Lord where it is? Innumerable times.  But the next story I heard, before I became a believer in Yeshua was from my sister, Janie. Janie was the first among us six siblings to come to faith in the Lord. She was hiking on Mount Baker with a group of her friends. She had to go to work, so she left the group early and started the walk back to her car. She realized that she had lost her keys!  “Oh, Lord,” she prayed. “You know where they are. Please help me find them. Then, partway down the trail, there were her keys, alongside the trail.

Let me tell you a few more lost and found stories.

My friend, Daphne, was getting dressed for an important day at work. State inspectors were going to be checking out everything in the nursing home where Daphne worked. As she put on the outfit she had planned to wear she discovered that the blouse was missing a button. She looked carefully  through her button jar, but it wasn’t there. In the process of looking for it, though, she found some agates in the button jar. She took the agates to place them on the shelf with the rest of her agate collection, and dropped one of them. When she reached down to retrieve it—there was her button on the floor! 

How about the story of losing my hearing aids?  OK. I had a massage appointment. I took my hearing aids out and put them in the side pocket of my purse. I had the massage. On my way home I stopped at the Safeway store. After that, while I was still on my way home, I pulled over to put my hearing aids back in my ears. I discovered that they were no longer in the pocket of my purse. “Oh, no!” I realized that I had put my keys in the same outside pocket of my purse and I must have lost them when I took the keys out of that pocket!  I called my massage therapist to tell her that I may have lost them in her parking lot, and I was on my way back (about 5 miles away) to come look for them.  When I got there she was looking in the parking lot, but had not found them. Then I spotted one of them on the sidewalk!  Yeah! But the other one was not to be found. I headed back to the Safeway parking lot. I remembered where I had parked, and starting walking from there to the entrance of the store. Behold!  There was my other hearing aid, in the parking lot, but undamaged. Wow. I could not have lost anything more valuable those hearing aids—even if someone had stolen my car it would not have been as expensive to replace!  Praise the Lord who knows where everything is!

Here is one of my favorite stories:

Before long we had a Grade A Milking parlor, milk house and I was making cheese.

Then my feet collapsed. I was making cheese, standing on a concrete floor. My feet were extremely painful. As I worked, I talked to the Lord. “It’s just pain,” I said, “I can handle it.” Suddenly I could not handle it. My feet refused to hold me up. I turned around with my back to the table and pulled myself up from the floor. Tim brought me a wheelchair. I didn’t walk for six months.

I went to all kinds of doctors and therapies, but nothing helped.

My brother sent me a story to encourage me. The story was about a Christian girl who was making a rock climb. On the way up, she lost one of her contacts. “Oh, no!” she cried, “Lord, I don’t suppose there is any way I could get it back!?”

When she got down to the bottom of the climb, another climber called out, “Hey! Anybody here lose a contact?”

“What!” the girl exclaimed, “you found my contact!”

“Yeah,” he said, “but wait until I tell you how I found it! An ant was carrying it across the rock in front of my face!”

The girl went home and told her family what happened. Her father made a cartoon of the ant and the contact. You can easily find this picture, and story on the internet.

I told that story many times during the six months I was in the wheelchair. I knew I was in the palm of the hand of the Lord. If he wanted to heal me, he could do it anytime. I knew I was in the chair for his purpose, but like the ant, I didn’t know why.

After six months I went to a birthday party for one of my granddaughters. A man at the party asked me why I was in the chair. He suggested that I take MSM to help whatever was causing the problem. I had never heard of MSM, so I went home and looked it up. MSM stands for methyl sulfonyl methane. It is a form of sulfur, like you would find in a mineral bath. At that time, in 2005, it had become a popular supplement for horses. In fact, the man who told me about it, said I could buy it at feed stores.

In my research, I learned that there was at least one company making a pain-relief cream with MSM.

“Well, I am a cream-maker,” I though. “I’ll make my own.” But I am also a disciple of Jesus, so I asked him to help me.

I knew I would start with the formula for the skin care cream that I had been making for about five years. I had received many testimonies on how helpful it was for various kinds of skin problems. So I added as much MSM crystal to that cream formula as I could before the cream began to feel grainy. As I rolled my chair along in front of my essential oils, I asked the Lord what else I should put in the MSM cream to make it effective. I believe he told me exactly what to put in it, and how much of each. I put five different essential oils in it.

By now Tim was standing behind me saying, “All right. You can make this stuff, but don’t even THINK about selling it!” He didn’t want to have to get involved with the Food and Drug Administration. I didn’t blame him.

“OK, OK,” I said. “I’m just trying to get out of the chair.”

The cream was super effective for my feet. In a day or two, I was walking again. I had to put it on often, several times a day if I were standing on concrete, but it worked!

I had a friend at the time who was going through chemo-therapy for the third time. She had a condition called “hand-foot-syndrome”. It was causing the skin on her hands and feet to peel. It was extremely painful. I gave her a jar. “It can’t hurt you, Debbie,” I told her. “And it might help.”

After a week or two she came back to me and said, “Grace, you have got to sell this stuff. It is the first thing that has helped us cancer patients.”

So we slapped and FDA disclaimer on the back of the jar and Debbie started taking it to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Then. . . the stories started coming back to us about all the things it was helping: Carpal tunnel problems, knees, torn rotator cuffs, tennis elbow, arthritis pain, even headaches.

We knew we had something. I started selling it at the fairs: Northwest Washington Fair in Lynden, Evergreen State Fair in Monroe, and the Washington State Fair in Puyallup.

The response, and the testimonies were astounding!  I have binders stuffed with written testimonies.

We even saw some things that can only be described as miracles. I will include two of the miracle stories below.

After several years at the fairs, we started selling it on-line. Now we have an uncountable number of email testimonies, too.

Jesus told stories about the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son. People rejoice when what was lost has been found. A young man in our home group told me a few weeks ago how our fellowship had affected him. “I was lost,” he said, “now I am found.”

That is the real essence of finding what was lost. Yeshua knows where each of us is, where we have been, why we are struggling, what we need, how to reach us—how to find us and bring us to him.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Yeshua HaMashiach, who has caused us to be born again to a living hope, according the foreknowledge of God the father.  Blessed be his holy name.

Amazing Grace.

How great the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found.

Was blind, but now I see.

John Newton, Amazing Grace