Perseverance — Needle in a Haystack

“The miracle, or power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit.” – Mark Twain

Nothing so special about a trailer full of dried oak and eucalyptus leaves, right? That all depends!

One weekend our family did some major grounds cleaning on the ranch where we make our home. Yard work had been neglected for several months. Leaves, eucalyptus buttons and bark were dense everywhere. My husband was sawing dead tree limbs about fifty yards from where I began raking. This level of the hillside location is rough ground with rock retaining walls, dried weeds and hundreds of holes where the gophers had left their winter mounds. And some of the area is planted in a sprawling ground cover called vinca.

After I raked for an hour I felt blisters forming on either side of my Lemurian Order ring, so I took off the ring. Having no pockets, I tucked it carefully under the elastic leg band of my jump suit, intending to put it in my husband’s pocket in a few minutes.

Three hours passed. The heavy piles of leaves were moved from one level to the next, over walls and through the vinca to the road level for easier removal. Suddenly I remembered –– my ring! It was not in the leg band! Somewhere in this huge area it had dropped to the ground!

We began the search, retracing all cleared areas, everywhere my path had taken me in the past hours . . . on hands and knees, in and out of the vinca, in and out of gopher holes, along each rock crevice. All the ground had been thoroughly irrigated as it was raked to keep the dust down, so hunting was on the muddy side.

We loaded all the piles into the trailer for further combing. The search went on while we raked down the entire length of the road. After dark we searched with flashlights. Sunday, another hunt on the grounds … to no avail. Then the hand combing of the trash piles began. We scattered handsfull from the trailer to a sheet of corrugated tin spread beneath, with all eyes observing and ears trying to distinguish between the sounds of pebbles, eucalyptus buds and sticks as they “pinged” on the tin sheeting. The leaves in the seven-foot trailer bed were thick and dirty and they looked like a mountain as the slow search continued.

Four days later – with every free minute devoted to the hunt and to concentrating on the significance of my naked ring finger – the carelessness of the incident loomed very large. We doggedly pursued the unending flow of leaves with one of us raking down a handful at a time and the other moving them off the tin.

At dusk on the fourth night, as I pulled the left corner of the load forward . . . resting on top of the two-foot piles was . . . my Lemurian Order ring!

A happy little boy stepped up into the load and picked it out. Three dirty-faced Lemurians stood there and spoke their silent prayer of gratitude and relief as a cold chill ran down my back and arms.

Many precious things are manifest in this bit of experience. The workings of the Great Ones in our environments are wondrous to behold when we are trying to do our best; the power of constructive thought should never be underestimated; the good thoughts of our Lemurian friends were much appreciated; another proof that many times we must go all the way to do all we can before a desired effect can result, and in difficult circumstances when all hope appears slim, we must recognize there is always one more possibility. Our family worked together untiringly in an effort to retrieve something of much greater value than its mundane worth and learned a truth that would be of value to us all our days.

Copyright © 2020 Lemurian Fellowship