MY COIN PHASE

It probably never happens to you, but unfortunately I’m one of those people who finds himself frequently saying to himself “I really must do something about that soon”. You know what I mean – the car needs servicing, “I must remember to make an appointment next week”; there was only a tiny bit of shampoo left this morning, “I must remember to buy some more”; the handle is coming loose on the door, “I must remember to get the screwdriver out later”. When you’ve got a memory like mine, “I must remember to” is a recipe for disaster!

One of the items on that “I must remember to” list, almost since I arrived here nearly four years ago, has been to do something about the considerable amount of coins and notes of foreign currencies, and pre-Euro currencies, that has built up over the years. In a moment of temporary insanity earlier in the week I decided it was time to not only remember, but to do something about the accumulation. I opened every drawer and cupboard, and the bags scattered on the floor, and gathered together all the various tins and jars and envelopes and attempted to put some shape to them. The notes were relatively easy – there were less of them, and the print was much bigger! They represented practically every quarter of the globe – from South Africa to Norway, and from Thailand to Argentina with calls along the way at such as Latvia, China, Brunei and Madagascar. I didn’t know there were so many places producing currency in the world.

But, as I said, that was nothing compared with the coins. Having first of all removed all buttons, holy medals, supermarket trolley tokens, phone-box tokens, brass washers, and other various irrelevant donations to our collection plate, I set out to sort the real coins by country. After a little time struggling with that, I decided that sorting by continent would be sufficient. Another period of frustration led me to the conclusion that they didn’t really need to be sorted at all – remove the sterling and dollars and leave the rest! And there’s the rub – “leave the rest” where? It doesn’t seem right to put them in the garbage, and certainly not with all the people in the world who would benefit from just a few of those coins; but on the other hand our enquiries so far have revealed nobody in Paris who wants them. HELP!!

I’m sure the tax collectors in our gospel today would have been interested – there are quite a few shekels among the coins! The tax collectors had a reputation of getting every last cent out of people, to the point where they were open to the charge of extortion. So bad was their reputation that it was seen by some as a scandal for Jesus to be seen sitting at table with them. But then, if Jesus was to avoid all whose lives weren’t saintly all the time, He would be a very lonely Jesus! Isn’t it really wonderful to know that it’s us sinners that He’s really interested in. He would want us to be less concerned with notes and coins and currencies and recognise the treasures we have all around us.