I met yesterday morning with Ann Stone who is our church accountant. All the money that comes in to help my mission trip to Vietnam goes through Ann for both tax reasons and transparency. We have a number of things to work through this week on both hers and my end. In my initial missions to Honduras and Haiti, I was with groups so there was no money to spend but that has changed since I began venturing out on my own, and by my own I certainly do not mean without the Lord! Changing money in other countries is not always easy. I remember my first trip to Honduras seeing these men with big stacks of money willing to turn our dollars into their lempera! For several years in Vietnam, we dealt with ATM machines which is sometimes a roll of the dice and often time consuming. We've improved our methods in recent trips but that a still leaves changing the cash I carry into dong, the currency of Vietnam. Hai, the preacher, usually takes me to a pawn shop instead of a bank because the rates are slightly better. Last summer, while at the pawn shop, the girl at the register was very apologetic when I went to convert a $100 bill. She explained that since the bill was older, she could not give me full credit for it. I really at the time had no other options so I took it gratefully. It cost me about one dollar in the exchange versus the full price I would have received with a new bill. I have so much to learn!!
Since the Lord expects stewardship out of His children, I thought the least I could do this summer would be to take all my US currency in fresh, crisp hundreds. Yesterday afternoon, I dropped into my local Chase bank and requested a chat with the customer service folks. A wonderful young lady who has helped me before took on my request. She told me that new hundred dollar bills are very rare and the banks usually only get them around Christmas time, in her opinion, for gift envelopes. But she didn't leave it at that. Picking up the phone, she called five or six other Chase locations and with one exception, they had no new hundreds. Since I still had to make a decision on how much I wanted to take in cash and get the check printed from Ann, I wasn't able to take advantage of that one exception. I'm going in to Chase tomorrow to get my old, worn out hundred dollar bills but I did learn two valuable lessons. One is that I don't know much about currency and two, stay with a business that goes the extra mile for their customers.
You may have seen that illustration in church where the preacher crumples up a twenty dollar bill, stomps on it, and asks, "Who wants it?" Of course, everybody does because we understand its value is not connected to its appearance. But we know that's not the way everything in the world works. Like the pawn shop in Vietnam, and I'm not criticizing their policy, higher worth in society is placed on things that look new and flawless. Fortunately, that's not God's standard. Our value is not weighed on the scale of physical perfection. We are made in God's image, even if we aren't Brad Pitt or Miss Universe. The best known Bible verse, John 3:16, doesn't say God so loved the lovely or the brilliant or the rich or the talented. In that scripture quoted in every Sunday school class, Jesus Christ says, "For God so loved the world......" And we realize the exchange rate for the world- the death of the Father's only son. That rate won't rise and fall due to inflation or the Federal Reserve or the price of a barrel of oil. It's set for eternity and praise God that it is.
Applicable quote of the day:
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