True Pennies from Heaven
by Shauna Niequist
Before I started collecting pennies, I used to throw them away, along with gum wrappers and used Kleenex. No one accepts them anymore, really. I keep hearing that they’re going to take them out of circulation. Bank tellers glare at me when I try to hand them several hundred and ask for dollars and quarters instead. The man at the Mexican restaurant where I eat doesn’t want them. I get the same thing every time. It always comes to $6.04. Six-oh-four. I hand him six or a ten or a twenty and then dig in my pockets for the pennies, but he shakes his head. No pennies, no.

I went through a toll booth once and paid the whole thirty-five cents with pennies. My friend and I giggled as I threw them in the basket one by one (plink plink plink) and the cars behind me honked. When I worked at a little surf shop in junior high, at the end of the day, we would balance the register to the cent, to the penny. But no one does that anymore.

All of a sudden, the loss of these pennies seemed tragic to me. So I started collecting them, in a pale blue bowl that my cousin Georgia gave me for Christmas. I sort them out of the more substantial silver coins in my pocket and set them in their new place, the smooth blue bowl. I don’t know what I will do with them, but there is something satisfying about watching their numbers grow, a little army of copper coins. It soothes me to think that if there is a place for them, then there is a place for everything. It seems immeasurably mature of me to do this, like having dish towels and stamps and spare light bulbs all in their respective places. It feels to me that if these worthless little coins have a place, then they have a meaning. And then if I have a place, I have meaning.

In a world where less and less actually exists, where you can spend money without actually having any in your hand, and you can chat in a room without actually chatting or being in that room, these smooth copper pennies are rare, curious things. They are the real thing.

So now I’m amassing pennies like you wouldn’t believe. Maybe someday I will melt them all down and make a trophy. Maybe I will grout them into my bathroom tile. Maybe I will shellac them in tidy rows onto my kitchen cabinets or make jewelry with them. I don’t know yet. But when I walk by the blue bowl in the kitchen, I find myself absently running my fingers through the coins, sure for the moment that there are things that are real and understandable, and therefore good, things I can hold on to when my hands feel empty.

My friend goes to a spiritual director, and I was asking her about it, and she said, basically, Sister Carmen asks her to talk about her life, and she points out the presence and action and grace of God when my friend didn’t even notice it was there. So it was there all along, and the trick is learning to see it.

Each one of our lives is shot through, threaded in and out with God’s provision, his grace, his protection, but on the average day, we notice it about as much as we really notice gravity or the hole in the ozone. So what I’m trying to do is learn to see the way Sister Carmen sees. Because once you start seeing the faithfulness and the hope, you see it everywhere, like pennies. And little by little, here and there, you realize that all of life is littered with bright copper coins, that all of life is woven with bits and stories of God’s goodness.

When I look back now, with these new eyes, it’s like there’s a bright copper path I was walking on and didn’t even know it. And it’s the handful of pennies that I’m clutching in my sweaty hand that gives me the faith and the strength to move forward. What gives me hope is the belief that God will be faithful, because he has been faithful before, to me and the people around me. I need the reminders. I need to be told that he was faithful then, and then, and then. Just because I have forgotten how to see doesn’t mean it isn’t there. His goodness is there. His promises have been kept. All I need to do is see.

So when I’m on the edge, peering over into the unknown, trembling and terrified to move forward, devastatingly afraid to take that next step, I practice believing that full life is beyond the fear. I know that God’s voice has led me to this exact place, and I grab a few pennies. They are sacred reminders that God is God, that he is leading my life, and that he is saying to me, as he has been saying to his people throughout history, I will never leave you, and I’ve left reminders all around, if you have the eyes to see them.

From Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life by Shauna Niequist