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Spittin' Image
It was the day Lenny got to spend at the bank with his father. They called it “take your child to work day.” As Dad showed him around behind the teller’s counter, he showed Lenny a neat machine that counted bills. “You look at this set of numbers and they tell you how many bills you have. If they are five dollar bills you multiply them by five, if ten-dollar bills multiply by ten, and so on.” The teller had just taken a wrapper off a stack of $100 bills and was putting them in the counting machine. “And if they’re hundred dollar bills, you multiply by a hundred, I know,” Lenny said. “Hey, look, those bills aren't all the same!” His father took a couple bills from another wrapped group 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 on which they've written some things; 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.” Review: How are bank tellers trained to recognize counterfeit money? 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, and the better we know him, the easier it is to know right from wrong. Reflect: 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? Reinforce: Place the newest dollar bill you can find in your pocket, and keep it there all day to remind you that it’s easier to know whether something is real--or “right”--by being really familiar with the original. Remember: “[A]s the Spirit of the Lord works within us, we become more and more like him and reflect his glory even more” (2 Corinthians 3:18b, NLT). |