November 13, 2024 - Good Morning! It’s Wednesday, November 13.
When I was a teenager, and soon after my salvation experience, my church youth group would regularly go out “soul-winning”. Sometimes we’d go door-to-door, sometimes to a mall or a park, and we’d approach total strangers with the good news about God’s love. Pretty scary at first - but it got easier in time. And we always took a special tool with us, gospel tracts. Even if our contact wasn’t interested in a conversation, they would usually take a tract.
Cold-call witnessing is much less common now. Most of our spiritual conversations come out of relationships - friends, co-workers, family. But I still have some of those old gospel tracts in my house. You have some little statements of faith in your home, too, and probably in your pocket or your purse. I’m talking about U.S. currency - money - and on every single coin and bill there are these words, “In God We Trust”.
On November 13, 1861, a Baptist pastor, Mark Watkinson, sent a letter to the U.S. Treasury Department requesting that American coins bear this spiritual thought. After just two years, it was engraved on the two-cent piece, and all the other coins soon followed suit. The change for paper money was much slower - not until 1955. A year later Congress adopted “In God We Trust” as the official U.S. motto, replacing “e pluribus unum”.
The use of cash is quickly going the way of the horse and buggy and the eight-track tape. Last year only 18% of financial transactions involved an exchange of actual currency. The advent of virtual money may very well produce a completely cashless society in the U.S. within our lifetime. In that future, all printed and minted currency will turn into antique collectibles. But the message will still be there, for future generations. A statement of faith, an acknowledgment of a higher power, an expression of trust.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
