ECKANKAR: Diamond in a Dumpster

E C K A N K A R, Religia Światła i Dźwięku Boga

Diamond in a Dumpster

How a Canadian Doctor Found the Jewel of God

by K. J.

Finally home from a weeklong trip, I tackled a huge pile of mail that had accumulated in my absence. When I finished, I decided to go for a hike. I slipped my diamond ring off and set it on the table with the mail.

When I returned from my hike, I cleaned all the papers off the desk as part of a general cleanup for a real-estate showing of my home the next day. In the middle of the night I woke up hearing the words, “Look for your ring.” Travel weary, I ignored it and went back to sleep. I didn’t remember to look for it until the next evening.

I searched in the usual and not-so-usual places. My ring was gone! It must have gone out with the papers I cleared off the mail table the day before.

Not to worry. When I dumped my garbage bag on Sunday afternoon, the dumpster had been full, so I knew exactly where my bag was—on the very top, easily accessible. But when I walked out to get it, the dumpster was empty!

I didn’t know where to begin. I knew the ring wasn’t covered by my insurance, and the diamonds were irreplaceable. There didn’t seem to be any hope of ever finding it.

Then I got an inner nudge to call the city waste department. It was Sunday night. What were the chances that anyone would be there? Nevertheless, I dialed the number. A very nice man named Ken answered, and I poured out my tale of woe. Ken was surprisingly sympathetic, but he was heading to the city to dump the garbage at six o’clock the next morning.

He described the truck to me—50 feet long, 10 feet high, and 8 feet wide, full of compacted garbage weighing 50 tons! It sounded more hopeless than ever, but he didn’t discourage me from trying. He even called the driver whose route I was on and learned that my bag was probably in the first section of the truck.

Now we’d narrowed it down to 25 tons.

I asked if I could come down, before Ken left in the morning, to go through the truck’s contents for a while.

“Sure, I’ll meet you at 6:00 a.m. I’ll leave the lights on so you can find me.”

So, now I had a date with the garbageman to go dumpster diving.

Almost as soon as I hung up the phone, it rang again. It was my real-estate agent, Denise, calling to arrange the showing of my house. I told her about my date the next morning. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “You can’t do that by yourself. I’ll pick you up.” I was too tired to argue.

Exhausted, I fell into bed and had a dream. My trash bag was on the left side of the truck, midway down in the first section, about two feet under. When Denise picked me up, I told her of my dream.

“Uh-huh,” she said skeptically, and away we drove.

When we got to the building with the lights on, Ken was waiting for me. “Do you have a pair of gloves?” I asked as I jumped in to the spot where my dream had told me to look. Denise and Ken jumped in behind me.

After forty minutes of digging, we found my bag—on the left side, midway down, about two feet under. But my heart dropped. The bag was full of holes. We gently lifted it onto the deck and began to sort through it. No ring.

“Let’s go through it one more time, paper by paper,” said Ken. Suddenly something blue caught my eye. At the very bottom of the bag lay a blue Styrofoam meat tray lined with absorbent paper. I gasped in amazement and relief. My ring had nestled itself in the container, safe and protected by the paper liner.

“Can I see what it is we’ve been searching for?” Ken asked softly. I showed him. “Oh, that was worth it,” he said reverently. I asked him what I could do to repay him, but he would accept nothing but a hug.

I realized afterward that finding the ring was merely icing on the cake. The real gift was one of divine love from these two exceptional people who had, without a second thought, jumped into a mountain of garbage to help me.

The next evening, while I was reading, my ring caught the light from my reading lamp. A brilliant blue light flashed from it. I knew it was the Blue Light of the Mahanta, reassuring me of his presence. Tears of gratitude welled up in my eyes and streamed down my cheeks.

We may have to search lifetimes through a lot of garbage in these lower worlds, but the love and protection of the Light and Sound of God is the jewel we find when we persevere.

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