One Sunday morning my only daughter Chloe, came down ready for Church wearing some pearls that I had given to Shelly (my wife who passed away suddenly in October of 2021) early in our marriage.
As I saw her approach my eyes teared up and Chloe immediately said, “I’ll put them back, Dad. I didn’t know they would do that to you.” As she hugged me tight.
“Nope. They look great. Please wear them to Church. You look beautiful.”
She smiled and twirled away ready to face the world… beautifully.
But those pearls stayed on my mind.
Why?
Because they meant a lot more to Shelly and I than just their value. They represented something Shelly and I had discussed many years ago.
Do you know how pearls are formed? As a reminder…
Pearls are formed when an irritant (mostly a tiny spec of sand) works its way into an oyster, mussel, or clam. As a defense mechanism, the mollusk secretes a fluid to coat the irritant. Layer upon layer of this coating is deposited on the irritant until a lustrous pearl is formed.
Isn’t that interesting? The same spec of sand, if it were to get in your eye, could scratch the cornea of your eye and eventually, maybe even cause blindness.
So… a Pearl is the result… of an irritant.
Shelly and I had discussed this many times as we’d faced difficulties, trials and frustrations in our lives… and… yep, in our marriage.
“This can damage… or it can beautify our lives. How can we make this a pearl?” She’d often say.
“When this is over we’ll have a STRING OF PEARLS.” She’d often joke.
So, you can imagine her surprise (and excitement) when I showed up with a… you guessed it.
A STRING OF PEARLS. Plus a matching bracelet and earrings.
No, they weren’t too expensive. But Shelly didn’t care. She wore them with an attitude.
You know… kinda like…
I EARNED these.
And they meant a lot to me, too. We BOTH earned them.
And when I saw them around Chloe’s neck, it reminded me of the last time I saw Shelly wearing them.
It was at Zak’s wedding reception a few years back. And it was the perfect time to wear them.
You see, Zak and his sweet wife, Danica had plans to get married earlier in the year until everything was shut-down. They kept pushing the date back until they realized it was no use…
They’d have to JUST DO IT. So, the wedding was planned and the reception hall was reserved… until 4 days before the date we had planned when Shelly called me at work and hesitantly said…
“They’ve canceled our reservation. We have NO PLACE for the reception.”
As soon as I got home, we started chatting about options and inevitably, she said…
“This is one where we HAVE to create a pearl… for Danica.”
We decided that we’d use our own back-yard (no one could make us cancel that) and started cleaning and pulling weeds and designing how it would look.
Within hours we had a plan and through a lot of hard work and Shelly’s ability to beautify ANYTHING she touches, we ended up having a fantastic and beautiful reception for Zak and Danica.
Here’s the point to my long-winded story.
We’ll all face our fair share of difficulties, trials and irritants.
We get to decide whether those trials damage us, or through the effort and attitude we apply, they beautify our lives.
From a few grains of sand to a string of pearls.
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