This morning, I heard the pocket of my shirt I wore yesterday jingle. Looking in the pocket, I found a nickel and a dime, and so I walked over to my bookshelf and put them in the jar on the second shelf.
It’s a small glass jar, small enough for me to fit my hands around it and just a wee bit shorter than my palm. It’s clear glass, and there’s a piece of paper taped around it like a label, flooded with the bright hues of my watercolor pencils. On the label is one word, printed in my large, childish letters.
Dreams, it says. And in it there’s all my silver coins that I’ve collected, the change from shopping trips and lucky parking lot finds that needed a home somewhere. It’s not a lot of money, and it’s not a fancy home, but I like having it there.
I don’t know what I’ll spend that money on, or when I’ll finally have enough to buy something worth having. It might be something as simple as a loaf of bread in college, or something as wonderfully fancy as a wedding dress. I might send it with a missionary to Africa, or use it to buy a ticket there myself.
My dreams have always meant a lot to me, obviously, but the trouble is, what’s in a dream? A dream is nothing until it’s brought into reality. Recently I realized that that takes a great deal of bankrolling, or at least in most cases it does, and so the little jar came to be.
Today, I invested in the future. I don’t know what it will bring, or what part that dime and nickel will play. I don’t know if it will help pay for my prom dress, or buy my little cousin a book that will change her life. All I know is that’s it’s there, in the jar, with all my hope and faith that something wonderful will happen and give purpose to it and to me.
Even though I’m too old for fairy tales, today I invested in a happy ending. Even though I’m too skeptical to trust in what I can’t see, today I invested in faith. And even though it was only fifteen cents, today I invested in dreams.