How the penny dropped on the Parable of the Lost Coin
First published in Sight Magazine, 6 August 2025
This Life: How the penny dropped on the Parable of the Lost Coin
“Or suppose a woman has 10 silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbours together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” – Luke 15:8-10 (NIV)
I always thought that treasure hunters who scan the beach with metal detectors are cruel. While I understand the childhood idiom ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’, what if it was their mum who accidentally dropped her precious jewellery in the sand?
Knowing my aversion to wearing jewellery, my children persuaded me to make one exception: a birthday ring with their initials inscribed on the inside. As a widower, this gift was akin to a wedding ring.
I never wore this ring to the beach, but had a couple of scares when I dropped it during gardening. It fell silently into the soil, but I always found it within a few minutes.
Except once.
I was laying down pea straw mulch on a newly constructed, raised garden bed. My ring must have fallen off.
I raked through the straw with my fingers. Repeatedly. Fruitlessly.
My internal ‘guilt’ voice started beeping: ‘Have you not learned to remove the ring before gardening? Or at least wear gloves?’ I placated the ‘guilt’ voice: ‘no need to panic, it’s a contained garden.’
Dark clouds were gathering over the dusk sky. Time to step up the search from bare hands to tools: I used a mini hand rake and combed through the fresh mulch. Surely the ring would get hooked.
After repeatedly scouring every inch of the garden bed, it was bucketing rain. Is this a cruel joke? All this water will push the ring deeper into the soil!
Time to be creative: I had a magnet in my toolbox and attached it to the metal rake. If the magnet could pick up ferrous metals such as nails, surely it could recover my metal ring.
Nope.
By now, it was very dark and very wet, but nothing else mattered. It was time for the LED head lamp to crank up (or down?) this ‘mining’ rescue mission. I’m sure this looked very suspicious to anyone watching.
Dripping in water and guilt, my heart was racing. How could I sleep tonight when this precious ring was drowning?
I purchased a metal detector online to arrive the next morning. Surely, that would be the last (pea) straw!
But it was too hasty, too cheap and too weak.
When I updated my children, they laughed at my perseverance: “It’s just a ring. We’ll buy you another one. Not worth losing sleep and getting sick over it!”
But to me, it was not A ring, it was THE ring.
In irrational desperation, I headed to the beach to bail up a ‘treasure hunter’ with my ridiculous request. As if a stranger would drive to my house with their metal detector!
Finally, a friend offered to hire a highly sensitive metal detector for this highly sensitive ‘customer’.
Within 60 seconds, the beeping was the most beautiful sound! My beloved ring was indeed buried well beneath the soil.
My elated heart wanted to sing out loud to everyone.
Then the penny dropped: the woman who found her lost coin!
Like her, I lit a lamp, swept the garden bed, and kept searching until I celebrated.
In the parable, that small silver drachma was probably part of her bridal headdress (semedi) adorned with ten coins to symbolise the ten commandments. Those coins were akin to her wedding ring from her betrothed.
While she worried that her coin fell through the cracks in the floor, I worried that my ring fell deep into the soil. While her dark house probably lacked windows, I lacked light and worked into the night.
The Lord moves in mysterious ways and breathes new life into timeless old parables.