Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, January 28, 2023
A few days before Christmas this past December, I stopped in at a store. When I came back to the car, I saw this hefty sheaf of lottery tickets on the parking lot blacktop. By zooming up the photo, I can spot at least $40 worth of tickets, and I can see the corners of three or four more (chillingly, the same color as the $10 ones) peeking out from behind.
So what happened here? Since these cards are all together in a stack, did someone spend all that money in the store buying these cards, and then drop them without noticing as they got into their vehicle? Or did they buy them, check their numbers, find they were unlucky, and discard the whole batch in disgust? Looking back on this experience, I guess I should have taken them back inside the store, but not knowing if they were still worth anything, I just left them there.
I’ve always regarded gambling the same way my parents did. They’d grown up as Dakota farm kids in the Great Depression, and the thought of throwing their money away on gambling froze their Christian souls in horror. They trained me to be so careful with cash that the moment I see that a penny has fallen to the carpet in our house, I reach down and retrieve it.
The Bible has a lot of balanced, sensible advice about money. For a couple of good refresher courses, click on the two links just below.