I was walking through a parking lot this past summer and happened to be looking down at the pavement. I normally watch where I am going but for whatever reason was looking at my shoes on this particular weekend afternoon. As I was noticing my running shoes, I saw a penny in front of my foot. While I don’t know anyone who stops to pick up a penny these days, I still do. (It comes from my father explaining to me as a child that money on the ground should be picked up. He believes - and I tend to agree with him - that it makes no sense to leave any small amount of money on the ground regardless of how small the amount is.) As I bent down to pick the penny up, I noticed another one nearby. I scooted over to that one and noticed that my left hand had a penny near it as well. I kept scooting… and the pennies kept coming. In all, I counted 43 pennies that I picked up from a fairly large area in this parking lot. I needed to get going so I quit picking up pennies but I’m not certain that was the end of the coins in this parking lot.

For quite a while I didn’t give this event a bit of thought. But then it dawned on me how scattered these pennies had been. It was not as though someone had just dropped a handful of change - these pennies were too scattered for that. And it was not as though there were other coins scattered along with the pennies; the pennies were the only coins that had been tossed in this section of the lot. My mind seems to remember the oddest of events and this one has stuck with me. How do dozens of pennies get, quite literally, thrown all over a parking lot? What possesses a person to take a roll or two of pennies and make the effort to scatter them?

After thinking about this non-event for quite some time, a quiet “answer” dawned on me. The “answer” is that people do things that sometimes do not have a rhyme or reason to them. And events occur that cannot always be explained in this lifetime. Not everything in our world can be figured out. We can ask ourselves question after question in life and many times not come up with a single answer. Why did that natural disaster happen? Why did I lose my home? Why did I lose my loved one? Why have I suffered with this terrible illness? Why do I struggle with this issue? Why did my child turn out the way he did? Why has my career been a mess? Where is the love I long for? Why can’t I get things together the way I need to? Why, why, why, why, why…?!?!?!! It’s the question children ask that we sometimes cannot answer.

And that is how life is. There are questions - many sometimes - that we often just can’t answer. Many times we don’t have the answers, especially when life isn’t fair. Just like the non-events such as finding 43 pennies in a parking lot, life sometimes throws very real issues our way that also don’t make any sense. Our Maker may decide to answer them when that time comes but until then we may just have to be content with picking up the random pennies… without always knowing why.