What if you decided to collect all the pennies you could find in a month? How many do you think you’d have?

Now, let’s take it one step further. What if you collected pennies for an entire year? How about 45 years?

A man by the name of Otha Anders did just that.
This man collected pennies for 45 years and blew his bank tellers away when he brought them in.
Otha Anders is a teacher from the state of Louisiana.
When he began collecting coins in the late 1960s, it wasn’t to amass any type of wealth; he just liked doing it. Even when the government began a program to pay $125 for every $100 of pennies turned in, he wasn’t interested. He liked having the collection.

Collecting pennies as an excuse to say a prayer.
Anders said that he began seeing pennies as a reminder to stop and say a prayer.

“If I see a penny when I’m gassing up, on the ground, or in a store, it would be a reminder to stop right there and say a prayer,” Anders said to ABC News. “I never failed to do that. That’s why they had so much value to me.”

At no point during all of his penny-collecting did Anders accept coins as a gift from anyone else.

“But I never allowed anyone, not even my wife or children, to give me pennies without being compensated,” he continued. “I wanted the inner satisfaction that God and I acquired from this collection.”

A reason to be thankful.
Over time, this practice of stopping what he was doing and saying a prayer every time he saw a penny became important to Anders. He noticed that on days when he wasn’t thankful enough for what he had, a penny would show up in his sights to remind him.