I saw a penny the other day.
When you see a penny, do you pick it up? Or let it lay?
For many, finding a penny brightens their day. "A Penny," they say. "Ooh, my lucky day!" Which is one of the reasons I'm so quick to drop pennies on the ground ... so little cost to share such joy! The other reason, of course, is that a penny is more of a bother to tote around then a benefit. So to the ground it goes. To be trodden upon, kicked around, rained, hailed, sleeted or snowed upon. Until the person comes along who finds great joy in the discovery of that penny.
I've pondered what coin I would pick up and slip into my pocket. Surely a dollar coin ... that's a no brainer ... and a 50 center, should I ever find one, would of course be trounced upon. A quarter would be fine too. Even though I really don't like coins in my pockets. Quarters are needed for ash trays in the car which then turns into air in tires or vacuums at the car wash. A quarter you pick up.
A dime might be where I draw the line. Sometimes I will pick up the dime to deliver it to my wife who is a penny picker upper. A dime is like a lucky day on steroids, I suppose, although I'm not sure what you can even buy with a dime. Nickels, of course, are toast. They just stay where they lay.
When I looked at the penny the other day, I pondered on it for a period of time.
I began to ponder, "Do penny's have different values?" I think they might. Surely you need a hundred to make a buck no matter what. But for a person with a coin purse, a penny is worth more than it is to me. I don't want the penny. Don't want to carry it. Don't want to transfer it from one pants pocket to another. It not only has no value to me, it in fact has negative value, unless of course the sale register says I owe two dollars and one cent and I'm stuck getting 99 cents, including four pennies, back.
Being an advertiser, I know that money has different value. A rebate is more valuable to the customer ... it's something they got back, a value they received for doing business with me. A rebated dollar is more cherished than a dollar never charged in the first place. Research and people prove that out.
In the same way, a penny found and picked up, brings far more joy than a penny given in change. When was the last time a clerk handed you a penny and you said, Ooh, its my lucky day? So a penny often has value way beyond its purchasing power. I have thought that maybe pennies should never be spent, just strewn around in a big happiness trade, handing out lucky days.
So as I stared at the penny the other day, I couldn't help but wonder if Joelyn would pick it up.
It's a fairly established fact that men can't aim ... or at least don't. You see, this penny I saw the other day was next to a commode at Logan airport in Boston. Viewing the bathroom, it seems that the Massachusetts minute men who fought the Brits must have had some ability to aim but that their decendants had lost all skill in that category. I susect you get the picture. And in the midst of this sprayed on sewer was the penny I was now fixated on.
Joelyn loves picking up pennies. A huge smile breaks out and an "Ooh a penny ... it's my lucky day" quickly follows. But would this penny qualify?
You have to wonder what type of a person drops a penny in such a place. Was it an intentional cruelty to those who strive to find a penny each day? Or did the penny just fall out of downed trousers? I have to vote for the former. Cruelty, I suspect. What a tough fate for that copper coin.
The question became, does this penny have any value?
As outlined above, I'm no penny lover. Can you even buy anything for a penny? I suppose some thoughts.
I began to have empathy for this penny. Not even Joelyn would redeem it, I presumed. Would the cleaning crew? Or would the man just sweep it up with the trash and throw it away?
That would not be the kind of outcome that penny deserved. That penny, as vile as it seemed, surely had at least once in its existence provided joy and a lucky day. And how much more potential that penny had to do more good over and over and over again if only ... if only I had picked it up.
The penny I saw the other day is worth a lot to me.
I keep thinking about the penny. And it keeps giving of itself to me. Much more value than it would ever bring in a store exchange.
I began to think of the value of that penny in the context of the value of a person.
Do we think of people like we do coins on the ground? Some worth our time ... others beaten down ... others pennies, if you will, like I saw in San Francisco a week ago, lying in a storefront, next to human excriment and the smell of pee, pennies that we're not sure about picking up?
I began to wonder if God would pick up the penny, filthy though it be.
And I knew the answer was yes. Not literally but figuratively. Not the money penny, but the lost, the downtrodden the forgotten. The penny people saw as valueless because of the situation it found itself in.
"You can buy two birds with a penny," Jesus said, "And your Father sees when one falls. How much more he values you."
And there's more, the story of the lost coin, the story of the lost sheep and of the lost son. A filthy, dirty, peed on, walked by, left behind son.
What a God we serve! A God who would see us as penny by a toilet in dirty restroom at an airport in Boston and still stop and say, "Ooh, A penny! It's my luck day!"