Lotto and Lent

I'd never purchased a lottery ticket in my life until recently when I purchased seventeen. Wait, actually, sixteen (Paul bought one of them) and this all started just before Lent season. Blame it on Lunar New Year's Eve when I was feeling rather auspicious and bought my first Lotto ticket, ever. Paul and I were at 99 Ranch Market, strolling around after lunch when the ticket machine outside the market caught my eye. I asked Paul whether he wanted to purchase a "Lucky Lunar New Year Lotto ticket" and he said, "sure." We pulled out our money and inserted it into the machine that quickly sucked in our delicious dollar bills.

Out printed our tickets. 6 random numbers on each. We made a mental note of whose was whose and I tucked our tickets away in my purse. Initially, we had no idea how to find out what the winning numbers were, so I looked up the California Lottery website and discovered that the numbers would air on TV in a few nights. We waited, then watched the drawing only to discover that we were two dollars poorer than we were the weekend before.

That was just the beginning.

With no jackpot winner, the Mega Millions jackpot continued to climb into the hundreds of millions and there I was, already late to work the following week, but pulling over to a local coffee shop to purchase five more tickets. A rush came over me as I thought about all the things I could do with the money. Things that I thought would certainly make me a good and worthy steward of those millions: give some away to charities, tithe (ahem, of course), invest in socially responsible companies, build safe-houses for survivors of human trafficking with job-training programs throughout S & SE Asia…yadda, yadda, yadda.

Needless to say, no jackpot for the Lucky Rabbit. Nope, not even for the Lucky Rabbit with ‘honorable’ intentions. If you do the math, you’ll figure between the second purchase and last week, there were 10 more tickets purchased before this burgeoning gambling addiction came to a halt. You might be thinking that I’m sharing this story in hopes for virtual absolution…and that could possibly be true. But what really hit home was thinking about my Lotto experience in light of Nouwen’s thoughts yesterday in Show Me the Way.

“There was nothing spectacular about Jesus’ life. Far form it! Even when you look at Jesus’ miracles, you find that he did not heal or revive people in order to get publicity. He frequently forbade them even to talk about it. His resurrection too was a hidden event. Only his disciples and a few of the women and men who had known him intimately before his death saw him as the risen Lord. Now that Christianity has become one of the major world religions and millions of people utter the name of Jesus every day, it’s hard for us to believe that Jesus revealed God in hiddenness. But neither Jesus’ life nor his death nor his resurrection were intended to astound us with the great power of God. God became a lowly, hidden, almost invisible God…”

The idea that Jesus reveals God to us in hiddenness challenges me. What I forget is that Jesus wasn’t looking for power or publicity in His ministry. That’s not how God revealed Godself in and through Jesus. That’s probably not how God wants to reveal Godself to and through me. Yet in our culture where “great notoriety means big money, and big money often means a large degree of power, and power easily creates the illusion of importance” I feel ashamed to admit that my hope of winning the jackpot betrayed my subconscious hope of gaining a large degree of power. Whether it’s power to make a good deal of positive change doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is that during this Lent season God’s presence isn’t going to be found in power as the world understands, but in weakness. God, help me accept and enter the paradox of Your hidden way in order to be set on the road of the spiritual life.