Line upon Line

As a lad, I got hooked on coin collecting.

Every Friday I took my allowance to the bank and exchanged paper money for rolls of coins, sifting each roll for the rare gems.

Buried Treasure!

One day, the first coin spilling out of a new roll was a Liberty nickel minted in 1899.

Heart racing, palms clammy, my eyes bulged when every coin in the roll was a Liberty nickel. In those days the bank required your name and phone number on all exchanged coin rolls, so I called the previous owner. She was a recent divorcee, desperate to get rid of her ex-husband’s coin collection as some sort of “payback.”

“Do you have any other old coins?” I asked the lady.      

“Sure do,” she said. “Can you come over yesterday?”

I ran to her house and exchanged twelve weeks of allowance for the entire collection, then darted home clutching the coin rolls as if cradling a genie in a bottle.

As I opened the rolls, every coin was a 19^th century collector’s item. What good fortune. This was better than buried treasure! Alas, years later, desperate for funds before joining the Air Force, I was forced to sell my entire collection to a savvy dealer for three hundred dollars; far less than fair value.

What Determines True Worth?

That experience taught me a valuable lesson about true worth.

The rarer the coin, the greater its value, with one caveat: the more desperate the seller, the deeper the discount.

For example, if I sell a rare Civil War nickel to a knowledgeable collector in an arms-length transaction, it will fetch a handsome price. If I sell the same coin under duress or out of ignorance, I devalue it. Ironically, the coin’s age, condition and scarcity has not changed in either transaction.

Rare coins, like priceless souls, are often devalued by the desperate. Under a more patient eye, a wise collector can spot the priceless gems. In the discerning eye of heaven, many a devalued soul is really a priceless gem, yet often discarded by a desperate, misinformed world.

Parable of the Lost Coin

In the Parable of the Lost Coin, a woman, having ten pieces of silver, loses one. (see Luke 15:8) She lights a candle, sweeps the house and seeks diligently to find it. When she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together to celebrate, saying: “Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost” (Luke 15:9).

Christ compares the woman’s joy to the joy of angels when one sinner repents. Not only is the woman’s search rewarded by finding that which had been lost, but her house undergoes a cleansing in the process. (see James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ, Deseret Book Company, September, 1915, 424). By her diligent search, her character, represented by the cleansing of her house, is transformed in the urgent work of recovery and attention to “that which was lost.”