Earlier this year, a woman in northern California won a million dollars playing scratch-off lottery. She used the money payoff a massive medical bill she accrued for a ruptured spleen. She gave people she loved gifts. And ever so grateful, she gave $100 bills randomly to strangers.
She also continued to play scratch-off lotto at the store she won her big jackpot. For old-time sake. And it seems that she gave some of these lottery tickets away--one of them to a homeless man, who told her she was 'lucky.'
Except that perhaps she was too lucky for her own good, because that ticket she gave away won $260,000. And now she says she wants it back. She never intended to give that ticket away, she says. Just the hundred dollars.
(Surveillance videos shows otherwise, we are told.)
So...
Anybody else think this sounds a parable that Jesus might have told, to reveal the petty nature of the human heart? Two things occur to me. First, if she was consistent in her grateful attitude toward life, she would have realized she really lost nothing, since she didn't ever have it in the first place. Second (and THIS is really my point), well, I am totally not surprised by her pettiness, in that I think most of us (including myself) would probably do the very same thing.
Human nature, Jesus tells us, is to be generous, but not too generous. That's our problem. True grace is always from God.
If that lottery ticket won just $100, well, then...
How do you think you would react?
Unfortunately, I think I would react the same way. Maybe I wouldn't ask for it back but I would most likely be thinking somewhere along the lines of, "I had that in my hands! It could have been mine... What I could do with that money!" For me it kind of reminds me of trying to store manna overnight. Kind of like, "I don't know when this will come by again. I better take what I can now.. just in case."
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