There are misconceptions we live with every day; we may not want to know the half of them. I’m reminded of this reality all the time. One such moment happened just the other day in a rather unique setting: Assembling a laptop.

I’ll start off by saying that I don’t usually dissemble/assemble laptops – I’ve only completely taken one apart once, and when I put it back together, it never ran. (Ok, granted, I was ten.) And although I could probably safely dissemble one after eight years of light computer work, my brother happened to be the author of this particular deconstruction. It was his first laptop which he had worn out, then passed to me, and reclaimed after my round of abuse. It had always run hot, but the hardware was still working, so he tore it down to improve the cooling system. His “new” server computer finally started coming back together this week, and here is where the moment of discovery hit me.

My brother needed a small piece of copper to fit between the computer’s graphics card and cooling coil, so after some deliberation he decided to file down a penny. I have known for years that quarters, dimes, and nickels contained filler metals; our government has been going cheap on our currency for years. Yet even so, I had always assumed that pennies were still made of solid copper. “Copper can’t be cost that much, right?” But alas, my misconception stands shattered.

A Penny from 1979: solid Copper

A Penny from 1993: 95% Zinc

I felt cheated – that those shiny pennies that brought good luck in folklore, were made of a cheap metal. They were a lie. I grew up with the saying: “A penny earned is a penny saved.” Yet even the smallest amount of money I owned wasn’t real! Ironically, the US Mint reports that it costs them 1.79 cents in materials and production per penny. Is that wrong or what? I bet it’s still not a cent’s worth of metal.

But that is how many things in life are. Much of the shiny things in this world are pretty cheap in the end – fake. Should we be investing our whole lives into fancy paper and pieces of coated zinc? My investment in this life comes down to things that will never will be destroyed by rot and rust, I’ve invested in relationships. The first and most important relationship I have is with the Lord Jesus Christ, and the second is my family – spiritual and blood relations, and then comes my relationships with all the people I touch in my daily life. With my investments in relationships, I’ll never have to worry about how much money I have or what it’s worth; I have recession-proof investments.

Where are you invested?