As a United Methodist minister, I preached a sermon on the Transfiguration 5 years ago. This incident of course deals with the return of Moses and Elijah from the dead to be with Jesus on a mountain and to confirm His divinity in front of Peter, James, and John (Mark 9;1-10. I'll mercifully spare you the sermon. What might interest you is its unexpected conclusion. I found myself assuring the audience, "AND THIS WEEK SOME OF YOU WILL HAVE YOUR OWN SPECIAL MOUNTAIN TOP EXPERIENCE." I had not intended to say this and felt a cross between divine inspiration and embarrassment at creating unrealistic expectations.

A week later, John (a retired Kodak executive) excitedly told me about his bizarre discovery while mountain-climbing in Colorado. High up on a tiny ledge, he found a nice ring that fit him perfectly. Could this be the fufillment of my prediction? That seemed a bit of a reach until Bob called me. Bob had lived in his new house for about 3 years. That week, he had disovered his mother's lost ring in the middle of his bed. He hadn't seem that ring in over 40 years. He was certain it had materialized from the spiritual dimension. Around the same time, his friend in another home had discovered his own mother's ring on his bedroom dresser. (I didn't know Bob's friend.) He too claimed that it must have materialized from thin air.

John had initially construed his ring gift as a mere coincidence, but was dumfounded when he heard about Bob's similar experience. Bob and his friend took their materializations as messages of love from their deceased mothers. This struck me as an interesting parallel to Moses and Elijah confirming their glorified existence on the Transfiguration mount. A few years later, Bob casually mentioned that both his mother's ring and the ring of his friend's mother had mysteriously vanished two days after their discovery. I wish I had known that at the time because I would then have asked John whether his ring had also vanished. But I had since moved and lost touch with John.

Two aspects of this bizarre nexus of materializations strike me as significant. (1) The coordination needed to pull this off. The mountain locale of John's discovery was needed so that Bob and his friend could connect their rings with my unintentional prophetic announcement. Bob's friend was not even in church that Sunday. Perhaps the two deceased mothers helped coordinate the materializations of their rings. (2) I had preached an earlier sermon on the Prodigal Son. In that sermon I had stressed the Father's ring as a symbol of the Father's love for his returning prodigal. So perhaps two of the rings symbolize both God's love and the love of the two deceased mother's for their sons. I love mysteries like this!

Regards,
Don