A Penny for your Thoughts?

I’ve heard that expression many times, but it wasn’t until recently — while watching a sermon by Pastor Steven Furtik — that it really stopped me in my tracks. I always thought “a penny for your thoughts” meant adding value to someone’s thinking, as in offering another perspective they might not have considered. But as it turns out, I couldn’t have been further from the truth. A little ironic for someone in my profession, don’t you think?

Curious, I dug deeper.

According to Candace Osmond (2024), a penny for your thoughts actually means:

“Someone is curious about your thoughts. It is a quaint way of prompting someone lost in thought to share what is playing on their mind.”

Back then, pennies held a lot of value, so by “offering a penny” for the person’s thoughts, it acted as a “symbolic gesture of interest and curiosity.” Which made me wonder:

"If someone is willing to offer a payment to know our thoughts, have we ever stopped to consider the real importance of it?"

So, if you really think about it, we tend to value material things more than our own inner world — sometimes without realizing it.

For example, would you wear an expensive pair of shoes to a place where you knew they’d likely be damaged? Probably not. So, why do we allow our minds to wander into places that damage our mental well-being — to dwell on unhealthy, negative, or harmful thoughts? What is the cost we pay for letting them linger in such a state? Since when did we stop valuing our thoughts? And perhaps the bigger question: what would change if we started treating our thoughts as something of significant value?

While we often encourage ourselves these days to “just let a thought pass” and not get pulled into it, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give awareness to what crosses our minds. The real task is learning to take ownership of those thoughts — to decide which ones deserve our attention, weight, and value.

I suppose, then, that we allow our minds to wander into places that harm our well-being for reasons like life’s challenges, our childhood upbringings, or even the way we feel about ourselves. I don’t believe we do this intentionally.

Rather, over time, we’ve allowed difficulties, circumstances, and narratives about ourselves to quietly determine the value and weight of each thought. And when we let those thoughts repeat often enough, they eventually harden into beliefs.

Now, could you imagine, the simple cost of a thought, turned into a belief system in your mind? The price we pay for it can either be healthy and positive, or unhealthy and negative.

So now, knowing what you know, let me ask you:

What would change if we started treating our thoughts as something of significant value?

Danielle