Sermon Illustrations
Pennies Prompt Man to Live with Gratitude
Mr. Otha Anders, of Ruston, Louisiana, spent 45 years bending down and collecting something most of us ignore—pennies. In October of 2015, the 73-year-old Anders, a supervisor for in-school suspended children, took them to his local bank—in 15 five-gallon jugs—and deposited a grand total of $5,136.14 worth of pennies into his account. The bank's coin machines took five hours to count all the pennies.
But what's truly moving about this story isn't Anders' thriftiness; it's his thankfulness. Each new penny on the ground served as a prompt to give thanks to God. As Anders told reporters:
I became convinced that spotting a lost or dropped penny was an additional God-given incentive reminding me to always be thankful. There have been days where I failed to pray and more often than not, a lost or dropped penny would show up to remind me.