Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.

Matthew 10:29 (NIV)

Apparently, the penny has finally dropped…from production.

I often think about summertime in my boyhood home of Mystic. There was a store at that time called The Emporium, all through the eighties, the nineties, and into the 2000s. If you’d like to know what it looked like, there is a Facebook fan page dedicated to it now here.

What made the place special to me was down in the basement, where they sold actual penny candy. Some things cost one cent! Some were two or three, and the really bigger ticket items ranged up into a nickel, a dime or a quarter. You could fill a small bag for a buck, without even trying.

But of course, everything has an end, even the pennies we spent down there.

The funny thing is, the penny got…too expensive!

At the time of its demise, the good old penny actually cost, wait for it: FOUR cents to produce. You don’t need to be an economist to see that it became a losing proposition. So now, going forward, the pennies that remain will still circulate, but most transactions will be rounded up to the nearest five-cent mark. We will learn, over time, to do without the humble penny. But what have we really lost, other than an object of nostalgia?

Well, every change brings a little grief, and this one will upset some more than others. Change itself is the only lasting constant. Even our church has changed, on occasion and over time. Remember three-hour sermons? Of course you don’t! We jettisoned those. Remember the bans on dancing, on singing, and on coffee in the pews? All long gone. Not just for the sake of change, but because those things didn’t really serve us anymore .

In a way, they all became…too expensive.

As we look to the year ahead, 2026 may bring more changes. But let’s examine each and decide, then and there, what we really need as a congregation. Who knows what territories we’ll discover and explore together, and who knows what we may need to let go because it no longer serves us?

As long as we can hold onto our essentials…our trust in God, our faith in Christ, our fellowship in the Holy Spirit, we will be well.