Have you ever read about people finding pennies after a loved one dies? I’d read the stories and thought it was great that these people had found something to help them through their grief. Did I believe the pennies were really from heaven? Did I think the person who had passed on had somehow found a way to manipulate a penny into a place where it would be seen by one of their loved ones? A place where you might not expect to see a penny, but these people found a penny there. In some of the stories, the pennies even have the birth date or some other meaningful date to the person finding it or the person who had passed on.
I never doubted the sincerity of the people telling the story, but I’m something of a skeptic or maybe like somebody from the Show Me State. If I couldn’t see it for myself, I always figured it was some kind of weird coincidence and/or the surviving person wanting to find a connection.
And then we went to the memory care facility Monday to get my mother’s things. She didn’t have a lot there. Just her clothes and blankets and wheelchair. But to keep from making a lot of trips the people at the facility let us borrow a dolly that made a little cart to carry the boxes and bags out to the car. We loaded it down and rolled it out to my car. When we finished unloading it, I started to take the dolly back inside and there on it was a penny. Face up. Now it could have fallen out of the old purse Mom had at the home. That was certainly a possibility for she did have a few coins in that purse. But the purse was up on top of the piles of clothes. It seems unlikely that a penny would have fallen out of it and not bounced off the metal dolly to roll away on the floor. Of course, it could have taken a lucky bounce and stuck on the railing, but the second I saw the shiny penny, I remembered the stories I’d read about all the pennies from heaven. And I felt a gentle touch from heaven that everything was all right.
My mother had a similar comfort experience after her mother died. My grandmother died suddenly and so Mom was not really expecting her death as we were with Mom. In the days after my grandmother died, Mom had trouble sleeping. Then one night as she was lying awake in bed, she says she saw her mother coming over to the edge of a cloud to look down at her and tell her, in no uncertain words, she was doing fine in heaven and she wanted Mom to quit all that worrying about her. That things were good in heaven.
Things surely are good in heaven. And some of us have a penny to prove it.
Have you ever heard a penny from heaven story or experienced something like that yourself?