Phoebe at age four playing "bottle caps" at a friend's house.

When we moved to a city in Africa, the first reason my daughter Phoebe discovered to love the city was the abundance of brown coins.  In South Africa, the smallest coin given out for change in stores is the five-cent coin, worth much less than the value of a U.S. penny. That means people are not very concerned if they drop one or two on the ground, and adults, even the poor ones, don’t generally bother to pick them up.  In the city center, which was just a few blocks from our home, Phoebe was virtually assured of finding one or two five cent coins on any walk around the block.  She treasured every one, having no concept of just how many it would take to be able to buy anything.  She picked up ones with acid burn holes, flattened by cars, and blackened by dirt.

She had always been amazed by things she discovered on the ground.  In our rural home, her favorite toys were bottle caps, sticks, leaves, pieces of rope, and other bits and pieces she found littered on the ground.  She probably learned it from our Zulu friends.  We once stayed with a rural Zulu family for a week, and the only toys we saw in their home were a broken cheap plastic phone that had been cracked in pieces, and a bag full of collected bottle caps and bits of wire.  She was in her element there.  On the other hand, when we visited an American family on our first visit back to the United States, she quickly shuffled through a huge tub of toys with bright colors and flashing lights, tried each one a couple times, and then asked me, “But where’s the other toys?  What am I supposed to do?”  I realized that without some cast-off bits and pieces of trash or nature to put together and build into contraptions, she wasn’t sure what to do with herself.

I believe it was in Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution that I read a story of a man who used to get annoyed by small change, especially in other currencies. Over time he realized his attitude about change was the same as his attitude about “the least of these,” the down and out poor or invisibles that Jesus warns us to care for especially.  “Don’t despise the brown coins,” was the lesson in summary.

It’s easy to look at all those little five cent coins that fill up my wallet and take more time to fish out (much less pick up from the ground) than they’re worth in monetary value.  The thing is, God’s kingdom has a precedence for valuing those very things: the little things, the little people, the things that don’t measure up in adult-world monetary standards.

I believe in this world we need to embrace more than ever the brown coins of the kingdom of God.  Into the Mud is a book of brown coins: unlikely people barely worth picking up off the ground, by monetary values.  And yet God, like a child, picks up each one and treasures them all.