Invisible Piggy Banks

When I first started playing D&D, I wanted to keep track of every single copper piece that passed through my character's hands. I wanted to track how many days he had spent travelling, so I could know how many rations he had used up. I wanted to know how many hours he had been in the cave, so I would know how many pints of lantern oil he had left.I wanted to keep meticulous track of every little thing, and it almost annoyed me that the playgroup I was with didn't care to track such things. I thought it was unrealistic that our characters never had to track their mundane expenses. But then I got an idea that I call "The Invisible Piggy Bank." 

The idea is that the adventurers get money that the DM doesn't tell the players about, and that money goes into the invisible piggy bank, until it goes toward paying the expenses that the DM says the player doesn't need to track. For example, if the adventurer gets paid for slaying giant rats, the DM could tell the player that the adventurer earned 5 gold coins, when the adventurer actually earned 6 gold, or 5 gold and 7 silver, or whatever. That extra 1 gold, or 7 silver, or however much it is, goes into the invisible piggy bank, and when the adventurer needs to buy a few more arrows or another length of rope, and the DM tells the player not to worry about it, the adventurer buys that rope or those arrows with the money they have stored up in their invisible piggy banks.

Essentially, the adventurers get resources they might not even know about that goes toward solving problems that they don't ultimately have to worry about. And so do we.

We have spiritual invisible piggy banks, in which we store up goodwill by doing countless, tiny, good deeds, that we think are hardly worth noticing. Every time we speak kindly or help someone else, every time we do our duty, or at least try to, every time we keep any commandment, even just the commandment to repent, we build up little bits of goodwill. And that goodwill is stored in our spiritual invisible piggy banks until they go toward tiny blessings and little miracles that we hardly seem to notice. Every time we see something beautiful, every time the Spirit touches our hearts, those blessings come by the grace of God, perhaps partly to repay out tiny acts of goodwill.

I've written about Concordance and how we're probably lucky that God doesn't keep track of how much we owe Him vs how little He owes us, but I think I might have been wrong to say that. It could be true that God doesn't track that stuff, or it could be true that God does track our good deeds and blessings, but also forgives our debts and gives us more blessings than we've actually earned. Just be we don't have to keep track of it, that doesn't mean God doesn't. We may not be able to "buy" blessings with Concordance, but I'm sure God "pays" us for every speck of goodwill we put in our invisible piggy banks, even if we fail to notice it.