For too long I’d clung to a bad relationship. Finally I’d found the courage to leave. I knew I was doing the right thing, the only thing, but that didn’t make it any easier. It had been a long time since I’d faced life alone. What if I’d made a mistake? What if a bad relationship was better than no relationship? Could I survive the loneliness?
I begged God to give me a sign that I’d be all right. One afternoon I was wandering through a thrift store, wondering if I’d ever find comfort. I picked out a few secondhand books and paid for them. When I turned to leave, I felt something under my foot. I looked down and saw a tiny gold cross. I picked it up.
“Someone must have lost this,” I said to the clerk at the checkout counter.
“Finders keepers,” she said. “It’s yours now.”
Was it the sign I’d prayed for?
I took the cross home and put it on a chain. For the next two weeks I never took it off. Every time I touched it I felt God’s reassurance that he was with me.
Yet I was troubled. The cross belonged to someone else. What if it meant as much to that person as it did to me?
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I returned to the thrift store and explained what had happened to the checkout clerk on duty that day. “I want to return this to whoever lost it,” I said.
“Karen?” the clerk called to someone at the back of the store. “There’s somebody here to see you.”
A woman emerged from the back. When she got close I held up the cross. She gasped and threw her arms around me.
“You don’t know how much this means to me,” she said. “I’ve had this cross for twenty years. I thought I’d never see it again.”
I told her what a comfort it had been to me. “It was the answer to my prayers,” I said.
“And an answer to mine as well,” she said. “I prayed that whoever found it needed it as much as I did.”
I returned Karen’s cross, but the comfort it brought remains with me to this day.
