When my sister was in her teens, she and a friend found a sizable stone roughly in the shape of a heart in a crumbling stone wall in the woods. Someone had, at one time, taken great care to chisel another heart in the stone’s center, transforming it into a birdbath. The property had been abandoned for years, so my sister and her friend carried the makeshift birdbath home, and from that point on it always had a special place in our garden. 

Years later, after my sister married and had a home of her own, the stone occupied a place in a garden leading up to her front door. Then one day it disappeared. She and her family made an exhaustive search of their property and the neighborhood, but with no result. 

I couldn’t accept the loss of the stone, and I told my sister I was going to pray about this, to which she agreed.