A penny for your time more than worth it

Recently, I was given some of the greatest treasures of all time, the diaries of a close lifelong friend who passed away suddenly of a heart attack in early July. While I was reading through most cherished moments in his life, I came across an account of a special summer, the summer of 1990.

In that account, he described a most unique journey, one that began early that summer in the small Indiana town where he lived. It seems that, every day as he ventured out for his morning walk, he would find stray coins. In his own methodical approach to life, he started keeping track of how many days in succession he had found a coin.

To his delight, he recorded that the string of days grew until the whole event became a type of his own spiritual journey. One day, to his surprise, no coin appeared as the day wore on. As evening set in, he said to himself, "Maybe this is the day that will break the string." The day continued without the precious find, and he had about given up.

On the way home from attending a musical, he stopped to refuel his car. There, in the parking lot of the gas station, as the time neared midnight, he found his precious coin, and the string went on for the rest of the summer. By the time the summer had passed, the daily finds had become like a type of "daily bread," a sense of reassurance only he and God understood.

In the small community where I live, an elderly lady loves to take a leisurely walk each morning with Spot, her small dog. Every so often, she can be seen bending over and picking something up off the street curb or sidewalk.

It took me a little while but I finally discovered she was in the "coin game." She was retrieving alien coins and placing them in her jacket pocket or apron pouch. It was only a penny here and there, but, in her eyes, they finally assembled into a substantial amount of cash that would certainly assist in meeting some of the mundane needs of everyday life.

Knowing there are others out there creating a "magical mystery tour" out of finding coins makes it easier for me to admit I am one of them. From sidewalk curbs to a hidden "cash drawer" where I dispose my change at the end of each day, I have come to appreciate deeply the old adage, "A penny saved is a penny earned."

One drawback with the advent of cell phones is that a major source of stray coins, pay phone booths, has disappeared. I'll never forget the day I found $1.66 in coins around the booth, all by scraping around the dirt surrounding the booth with a small stick. A moment to stop for a pay phone check almost always meant a mounting account for the local piggy bank.

For many, the coin journey may seem a bit unusual, or a waste of time, but put things in perspective. If you find a dollar's worth of coins in a week, and gasoline is $2.51 a gallon, a donation from your newfound coins can reduce that to average at $2.49, which looks quite a bit better, at least in my eyes.

I used to wonder about the parable in the Bible about the lady who searched all day for one lost coin.

"Silly woman," I would think. "Look how much time she's wasting just look for that thing." One day, it dawned on me that it wasn't just the face value of the coin, but it was the value of the lost being found that touched her heart, like the value of a moment spent with a child, a second to capture a beautiful sunset or a quick visit on the street with someone we rarely see.

It's more than the worth of the coin; it's the realization of having found something that adds to life's value that this is all about, and those moments are rare today.

It might seem amusing to some to look for coins around phone booths or go for a penny search across a parking lot, but add up the number of little special moments that money can't buy in a day's time, and it gives the whole concept a new sense of worth.

Who gives a penny about anything these days? I do, and life is much richer because of it.