Fools Gold (1)

He never expected to actually win the lottery. He seldom even bought tickets, thinking of the old folks on fixed income who seemed to do so with such need. He wasn't one of them. How depressing that those folks had so few hopes left. When he did buy the tickets, he did so with a sense of guilt. Life had presented him with so much in the way of good fortune, already; buying a lottery ticket was like looking a gift horse in the mouth.

If you bought one, then could you resist the little prayer, "Please God, let me win?"

"What a sorry thing to pray for," he figured. "You've already won the biggest lottery in the Universe, just being alive. On top of that you were born human. You were born in the U.S. of A, too -- richest country in the world. Yet you've lived in places where a man could piss in his own backyard whenever he wanted to. You may live in a city, now, but you've seen country life, and you'll see it again... no doubt."

"You've lived dangerously all your life: farming, drinking, whoring, doing the whole Vietnam thing, then the Navy and submarines. You've dirt bike raced and survived a broken neck. You scuba-dived where there were sharks, survived flooding casualties on a submarine, jumped out of an airplane many times and once out of one that later crashed with twelve good people aboard--several of them you know were more righteous than yourself. Then there have been truck accidents, biking accidents, and near misses aplenty. Even when you've merely been low on gas, and prayed for a way out in the middle of nowhere, help was provided... more than once. Sometimes, even without praying, your guardian angels were there"

To waste a prayer for wealth was to tempt God into never answering prayers again.

"Lord," the angels might say, "Jerry is praying to you."

And the almighty might answer, "Don't worry, he's probably just just asking for money again.

But on a deeper level Jerry knew better. God was never distracted from anyone in need and could easily forgive even the occasional wrong-headed prayer. The reason God didn't see to it that he won the lottery had to do with God knowing what he needed more than what millions of dollars could buy, and it had to do with the whole free-will thing. Happiness wouldn't depend upon choices people made if they could game God, and maybe happiness was all about how we decide to live when decisions aren't easy. Besides, in leau of winning the lottery, Jerry could talk to God.

Maybe it wasn't God at work, then. The instant he learned that the computer-picked numbers were winners, he wondered whether it was a curse.

"Maybe I should give this all to charity," he was his first thought. The fear of evil at work prevented him from feeling any pleasure at all... at first.