Penny Bargains

I can remember more than a decade and a half ago when my family started building a big old garage at our home on Blake Road. My Dad, the mason in charge, put a cornerstone dated 1990 in an especially visible place out front. Before he laid the special brick, though, he gave us kids the chance to put a real shiny new penny in the mortar for good luck to go along with whatever wish we could make. Most kids, I’m sure, would ask for a bike or a puppy or maybe summertime all year long. For me, though, I could think of nothing more important to wish for than the health of Grandma Donahey, the mom of my mom. She had been sickly for as long as I could remember and more recently hospital and bed-ridden, and as her young grandchild I was overwhelmingly burdened for her well-being. And so, with the fully-trusting and fully-given-over heart of a five-year-old, I made a secret but powerful prayer for the health and life of my grandma.


With my lucky penny firmly cemented in place and my wishful hope steadfastly determined in mind, I figured that God had to do something for me and my grandma. Surely He could see how important my shiny piece of metal was and would know, too, how important the wish was for my soft and vulnerable heart. I hadn’t asked for anything selfish, after all, but instead sought so earnestly something so good for someone I loved so much. With such pure motives, surely God had to act in an amazing and incredible way, perhaps making my grandma breathe all right again without oxygen tubes so that she could get up and dance around and even play with me like other grandmas did.


Needless to say, my heart was broken and continued to break as Grandma’s health continued to decline. She never did get any better and never could really play with me at all, and ended up passing away a short two years or so after I made my wish. Although my lucky penny was still part of the garage’s foundation in 1992, I was suddenly seven years old and without a single grandma in the world.


I think I learned then a mightily powerful lesson: God doesn’t play by my rules. He doesn’t have to heal people because of lucky pennies, and He doesn’t have to change things because I feel a certain way about them. He doesn’t have to relieve physical suffering because it makes me feel bad, nor when making His decisions does He have to honor my innocent pleas for the well-being of those I care about. The world can be rough, I found out early-on, regardless of all my best wishes and most ardent prayers otherwise. Sometimes what God decides to allow just doesn’t make sense to me.


I had no idea, and I still don’t have any idea, of what God intended by allowing both of my grandmas to die so young. Like Job, though, I figured out that “God can do all things, and that no purpose of His can be thwarted.” Also like Job, I learned that in my pride and foolishness I had demanded too much of God in the healing of my grandma. I had tried giving a mandate to the All-Mighty, and received back for it a lot of nothing that I had required. As His creature, I had told my Creator what was best for my grandma and for me and what He had to do for her on my account, but I had “hid counsel without knowledge and uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”


All of which brings me back to today. You see, I’ve got a new shiny penny in my life and a new unselfish request, too. My new lucky coin is the time I’m spending here in Paraguay—a year of my life doing good and exciting things for others. It’s bright and nice and new and impressive, too. My new unselfish request is pretty moving, also -- a constant burden and heartfelt prayer for the reunification of my family. Like before, it’s a pressing and hard situation that requires healing and life and the grace of God. Like before, though, once more I’m realizing all over again that my shiny penny isn’t working.


Before I left for Paraguay, I let God know of some pretty important conditions for my going: namely, that although there were so many worries in my family at home (shouts of anger from siblings, whispers of divorce between parents, wailings of fearful abandonment from a bed-ridden ailing grandfather who hasn’t made a good confession of faith in decades) I’d still go to Paraguay if He could make sure to take care of them all. I’d go away, give up plenty of comforts with all my ambitions, and lay a fresh coin in the mortar so that He’d have to fix up familiar things in healing broken hearts, putting back together messed-up relationships, and bringing back to faith those who’d left it. I really believed God owed it to me.


Now that some time’s past and things haven’t gotten any better back in Ohio, though, I’m in a hard place where I’m learning again that it’s awfully foolish of me to try to tell God what He has to do. All the expectations of everything I ever imagined being fixed in my family have been shattered, just like the time when I put a lucky penny under the cornerstone of a new garage, made a wish for my grandmother’s health, and then she died. I feel as if I’m losing all over again a certain child-like innocence to my faith (or is it presumption?), as if my expectation for practical graces at work in the world around me are completely unfounded and, as Job says, without knowledge. I know it know it sounds like a sad story, but really, who am I to question why God can’t be paid in pennies?