“Anything that is lost can be found,” was the only hint that Kenneth Stelly gave his wife, Rachael, about her 2008 Christmas present.

To her amazement, her husband had found the wedding band she had lost more than ten years before!

The Stelly’s were married in August of 1987, and for their tenth year anniversary, the couple decided to upgrade their wedding rings.

While Rachael was expecting their youngest child, it became a regular habit for her to take off her rings due to swelling associated with the pregnancy.

She always kept the rings safe in her purse, and was devastated the day she reached inside and found the band missing!

“At first,” said Rachael, “I didn’t know what to think. Was the ring stolen? Was it simply misplaced? Or had it been accidently thrown away?”

The family began an extensive search which dragged on for six long months.

They frantically explored their home and any places they had recently visited.

They removed fabric from the bottom of furniture in the hopes that the ring had settled into a crevice.

Rachael even removed the seats of a friend’s van in an attempt to find the ring!

The couple went to more extreme measures as well. They purchased a metal detector to search area ball parks where their kids played and also searched through their three acres of land.

Rachael prayed the nine-day Novena and even visited a card reader to get some mystical insight.

Despite their extensive efforts, the almost four thousand dollar wedding band remained elusive.

Elusive, that is, until December 19th 2008.

Kenneth had parked his cargo trailer on the side of a cement slab in the their yard. The tire created a rut in the soggy ground causing some mud to gather around the tire.

As the mud dried, it fell off onto the cement slab. When he passed by on his way into the field, something caught his eye in the dried mud.

There on top of the dirt lay his wife’s missing wedding band, just in time for Christmas!

What are the odds that out of three acres of land a ring missing for a ten year duration would turn up at that very spot due to a chance occurrence?

The ring was cracked on one side, but all of the diamonds were still intact.

Rachael replies, “Finding this ring after so long is just a wonderful experience.”

Since the area of the yard that the ring was found in was often where Rachael parked the school bus she drove, she can only deduce that the ring must have fallen out of her purse, and out of the bus, onto the ground.

It must have been repeatedly trampled upon and driven on over the past ten years.

The Stelly’s brought the ring to a jewelry story where the workers still recalled the story of the missing ring ten years prior.

Rachael was able to consolidate some of the diamonds from her current ring into the lost wedding band and revamp it.

She took one of the diamonds from the lost ring, which was originally from her very first wedding band, and incorporated it into a mother’s ring which she received just recently for her fortieth birthday.

As an afterthought, the Stelly’s conducted an experiment with the once missing band.

They wanted to see how far below the metal detectors range the ring had been buried, so they placed it under some cushions approximately the same depth as it was buried in the yard and then passed the metal detector above it.

To the Stelly’s amazement, the ring had only been buried less than an inch below the detectors spectrum!