I dropped a penny in the parking lot outside a sandwich shop in Kailua yesterday.
As I reached for my car door handle with my pinky finger, it slipped loose and fell to the ground.
I looked down at it.
My hands were full and my hip has been bugging me lately, so I paused and wondered whether to even go to the effort of bending down to pick it up.
According to the U.S. Mint, making cents makes no sense anymore.
So we’re on our way to becoming a penniless society.
“Penniless” makes me think worthless, and suddenly I felt kind of sorry for that little penny lying there on the hot blacktop.
So I bent down to rescue it.
And something about it caught my eye.
It looked… different.
Worn almost perfectly smooth.
Now my curiosity was piqued.
So I picked it up.
I flipped it over and saw the familiar wheat stalks on the back.
A wheat penny.
They always take me back to Kansas, where I was born.
I wondered what year it was made, but the date was so worn I couldn’t read it.
So I got into the car, took a picture of it with my phone, and zoomed in on the image to see if I could make it out.
And there it was.
1944.
Right in the middle of World War II.
Which means that penny has been passing through hands for more than eighty years.
Think of it!
How many people had carried that penny along to wear it down that much?
A coin minted in the middle of a world war, now lying in a parking lot outside a sandwich shop in Kailua—while I stood there holding a submarine sandwich, no less.
My train of thought was racing now—which is usually when I notice God joining in for the ride.
The Passing of the Penny
And now we’re talking about getting rid of them.
Apparently they cost more to make than they’re worth.
Which struck me as a little sad.
For generations, counting your pennies meant counting by ones.
It feels strange to think we might not count that way anymore—rounding everything up to the nearest five.
But nickels just don’t carry the same weight in our language.
You can offer a penny for someone’s thoughts.
Things can cost a pretty penny.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
But nobody ever talks about nickels from heaven.
A Small Copper Pilgrim
Once I noticed that 1944 date, that little coin stopped feeling like just another piece of change.
It felt more like a traveler.
My imagination started running.
Maybe it crossed a grocery counter during the Great Depression, when every penny mattered.
Maybe it rode for years with a young soldier during World War II.
At some point it must have crossed the Pacific.
Did it arrive before Hawaii became a state?
Or after?
Did it make the journey tucked into someone’s luggage on an airplane…
or in the pocket of a Navy sailor on a ship bound for Pearl Harbor?
Maybe it bought penny candy for a kid at a corner store.
Maybe it rattled around in a piggy bank.
Maybe it passed from a mother’s hand to her son’s before landing softly into a church offering plate on a peaceful Sunday morning.
Who knows how many hands it passed through.
How many miles it traveled.
A small copper pilgrim moving quietly through nearly a century of ordinary human life.
Not bad for something the world now says isn’t worth very much.
And somewhere in the middle of those wandering thoughts, another one slipped in.
I was just one more step in a sweeping journey for this penny.
Sweeping…
which reminded me of the parable Jesus once told about a woman who swept her whole house looking for one small coin. When she found it, she was overjoyed.
The Kingdom of God is like that—rejoicing in finding the small and the lost.
The Power of One
Standing there in the parking lot, looking down at that penny, it occurred to me how easily we decide what something is worth.
It’s only one cent.
Not worth bending down for.
But the more I thought about it, the more I began thinking about the other ways the Kingdom of God notices the small.
Jesus told stories about mustard seeds.
About widows dropping a couple of tiny coins into the temple treasury.
About a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep behind to search for the one that wandered away.
Heaven’s arithmetic works a little differently than ours.
One matters.
Even one cent.
Even one lost sheep.
Even one overlooked person.
Bending Down
Standing there outside the sandwich shop, I almost left the penny where it lay.
After all, who bends down for one cent anymore?
But something made me stop.
Maybe it was the word penniless.
Maybe it was that worn little coin lying there on the hot blacktop.
Either way, I bent down and picked it up.
Apparently the Kingdom of God pays attention to small change.
Even one cent.
