That money looks funny!

REFLECTING HIS IMAGE.

Lenny got to spend the day at the bank with his father. They called it "Take Your Child to Work Day."

As his father showed him around behind the tellers' counter, he pointed out a neat machine that counted bills. The teller had just taken a wrapper off a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills and was putting them in the counting machine.

"Hey," Lenny said. "That money looks funny!"

His father took a couple bills from the machine and showed them to Lenny.

"They've just come out with a new one-hundred-dollar bill to make it more difficult to make fake ones. See, the picture is larger, they've moved it off-center, they've used a special kind of paper ... and if you hold it up to the light, you can see a strip with writing on it. While it might be possible to make a good copy of most of what you see on the bill, it's supposed to be harder to copy everything."

Lenny was confused. "You mean whenever you get a hundred-dollar bill, you have to hold it up to the light?"

Lenny's father chuckled. "No," he said. "Bank tellers are trained to recognize counterfeit money by handling nothing but the real thing. They sort and stack and shuffle real money all day long, hour after hour. The more they see and handle the real thing, the easier it is for them to recognize a fake because something about it just won't feel right. When a counterfeit bill comes along, a teller's familiarity with the real thing will help him or her notice something different about the counterfeit. That's when he holds it up to the light or gets a magnifying glass or asks for the head teller to inspect it. But usually a teller is so familiar with real money, he can spot a fake pretty easily."

"That's neat," Lenny said. He smiled at his dad. "Think you could give me a bunch to practice on?"

"Sure," Dad said, "in your dreams."



Think about it: it's easier to know whether something is real or "right" by being familiar with the original. When it comes to choices between right and wrong, God is the original. How well do you know God? Does your relationship with God help you make right choices? How can you know God even better? How can you "reflect his glory" even more?