Admiring stones in Sydney recently, I was reminded of a story told by Phil Sanders about a man who visited Tiffany’s in New York City.
He was shown a magnificent diamond with its gleaming yellow light and many other splendid stones. But he observed one stone that was perfectly lusterless and said, “That has no beauty about it at all.”
The friend who was with him put the stone in the hollow of his hand and held it there for a few minutes. When he opened it, the man said, “What a surprise! There is not a place on it the size of a pinhead that does not gleam with the splendor of the rainbow. What did you do with it?”
His friend answered, “This is an opal. It is what we call the sympathetic jewel. It only needs contact with the human hand to bring out its wonderful beauty.”
How many lives there are that need only the warm touch of human sympathy to make them gleam with opalescent splendor?