Dirty Pennies

I had the privilege this week of emptying the Shop Vac. Not a pleasant chore, but something that is necessary when you go to use it and a puff of dirt gracefully lands on your face. The weather cooperated enough for me to take the whole process outside, which would have amused the neighbors if I had any close. I had my grungy clothes on along with a dust mask and a pair of yellow rubber gloves. I opened the Shop Vac, had my garbage bag ready and was just getting ready to dump when I spotted something sticking out of the filth...a penny. My eyes did a quick inventory and I counted up 7 pennies nestled in the debris (this is undoubtedly due to the fact that Daniel used the Shop Vac to clean out the car). Now my rational side said to just quick dump the dirt and get on with it, but the other 95% of me thought:

It's money, you can't just throw out money.
If I ignored every penny that I saw, I would probably be at least $2.00 poorer by this time in my life and $2.00 is pretty exciting.
Think of the fun that you can have with $2.00.
Even though the pennies are dirty, they are still worth 1 cent.
I could even take them somewhere without cleaning them up and be able to spend them.
Dump or retrieve, dump or retrieve.

Those that know me can probably guess that I am now 7 cents richer (8 cents when you count the money that I found in the laundry on the same day). I just couldn't condemn them to the garbage. I even gave them a quick garden hose bath so that they wouldn't contaminate the other residents of my change jar. I rescued the pennies and I felt giddy the rest of the day.

As I was trying to go to sleep that night, I was thinking about my pennies (seriously) and I felt one of those God lessons coming on. A penny is still a penny even if it is surrounded by dirt or covered in dirt or anything else for that matter. It can be cleaned up and it can be used and one penny isn't worth less than another just because it spent some of it's days in a Shop Vac. A person is a person is a person and God values us all and can use us all and expects us to realize that about others. All are valuable and I believe that God is reminding me of that and if I know God, He will probably test me on this lesson sometime in the near future.

Something I learned about Roscoe today: a television is just any old piece of furniture unless it is displaying animated butterflies flitting across the screen. Then it is downright intriguing.