One shopping cart coin….
Anyone who follows our blogs a bit may have already seen them: the shopping cart coins. A simple evangelistic project. They are distributed by the hundreds in a number of countries and in several languages. But what is the effect of those things?
A while ago, we were approached by someone, we had given some of those coins to other people.
He had given one of those coins to a man who was in a hospital. One coin.
When he came back to visit him later, he noticed something: one hand of the patient was holding something VERY tight…
When he asked what he was holding so tightly, he showed it: a shopping cart coin. That was the best thing he had.
When he was still healthy he never went to church, but he occasionally watched the church service on the internet with that brother. And now in the last days of his life he held very tightly that coin with the text: Jesus loves you.
He passed away a few weeks ago.
And what’s in it for you as a reader? As human beings, we often prefer to think in big terms. Big campaigns to help people, preferably trucks full of something, that makes an impression! The truth is different… very often it’s about the little things, of which you might sometimes think: “Is this really going to help”? The answer is yes.
In this case, it was about one shopping coin. Just one.
- Someone came up with the idea and there was also someone who said: great idea those shopping coins, go!
- There is also someone who makes those things in a shed behind his house.
- Someone has also said: yes, fine, just put them here so that other people can take them to hand out.
- There has also been someone who took one such coin and gave it away to someone else.
- And in the end, there was one person who, in the last days of his life, held on to that one single coin… that one gesture, those few words written on it.
These have all been people who have (humanly speaking) done something very small… and all of them could have thought: “oh, this is so little”, or “I have been doing this for ages and never hear from it again”, or “I can’t do much, so never mind”, or “never mind, this won’t help anyway”…. But they didn’t! They all did something small… and in the end it gave someone something to hold on to in the last days of his life. Literally and figuratively.
That reminded me of the following two verses:
Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.
1 Corinthians 12:14-18
Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.
Luke 16:10
Jesus loves you. Hold on tight to that message.
What little things are you going to do today?
