I have a friend that gave to me a new state quarter every time they were released. She also made me the recipient of a brand new shiny gold Washington dollar the year those were released by the U.S. Mint. It is a beautiful coin. Exquisite, really, if you collect coins. It’s quite similar to the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
The day I received those two coins – the newest state quarter and the Washington dollar, we were sitting in North Idaho, eating lunch. It was a beautiful day, full of sunshine and not a cloud in the sky as we sat by the lake right across from her work.
There were three of us there that day and she gave coins to the two of us who had met her for lunch. I looked at the coins in my hand. I was more drawn to the gold than the silver and noticed George on the face of the coin.
“Did you notice he isn’t smiling on the dollar coin?” I asked my two friends.
No, they hadn’t noticed.
They took another bite of lunch while I kept looking at George. Then I looked at George on the quarter. “He’s smiling on the quarter,” I said, bringing my ongoing investigation up to date. “It’s somewhat more of a mischievous smile, but it’s there.”
They hadn’t noticed that, either. I looked back at the gold coin.
“Did you notice they got rid of “In God We Trust” on the face of the coin?”, I asked.
One replied yes. The other, no.
“Get this,” said the friend who gave me the coin, “they’ve put it on the side.”
“That’s stupid,” I commented. “It’ll get rubbed off.”
I thought, ‘Just like we are rubbing God right out of our country.’
We take a little bit of Him out of this and we take a little bit of Him out of that and before we know it, He’ll be completely gone and when we are at the end of our ropes, we’ll cry out to Him – but why should He answer? We didn’t need Him then. We made that more than clear. Why then, should He want us now?
Some days we wake up and feel empty and alone and wonder why. The answer may be simple, really…
One day we chose to rub out our prayers before meals. Embarrassing when we go out to eat. Can’t have that. What will people think? And the next week we rubbed our quiet time out of our mornings. Gotta make this meeting, gotta make that luncheon, gotta do this, gotta do that. And it’s becoming quite easy to justify rubbing church off the calendar because of the songs they’re singing or the pastor’s preaching much too long, or no one says hi or… . Before we know it – we’ll have rubbed God completley out of our lives.
“In God We Trust.”
It’ll get rubbed right off of the sides of those dollars. Just wait and see.
A little here, a little there. To want Him off the coin, He had to have been void in our lives. Before we know it, we’ll have rubbed Him out of everything.
From my heart,
