Sunday Morning Meds--That Great

“Your ways, O God, are holy.  

What god is so great as our God?”

Psalm 77:13

It couldn’t have happened to sweeter people—they’re social workers. Thirteen Missouri state employees who work for the Department of Social Services Family Support Division/Child Support Enforcement in Missouri claimed a $224.2 million Powerball jackpot a couple years ago, the largest prize ever won in the Missouri Lottery. That means about $8.5 million apiece before taxes. Not bad for a $5 bet.

I don’t play the lottery or hang around casinos. My wife and I walked into one several years ago—the Winnebagos’, just south of here. We divvied up $20 bucks in tokens, played the slots, and walked out 15 minutes later, twenty bucks poorer. Haven’t been back to the bandits since—and likely won’t.

I’m not self-righteous about it. I’ve eaten in lots of Great Plains reservation casinos, and I often giggle at the irony—dozens, even hundreds of old white folks madly tossing their bucks at Native people. Don’t tell me God has no sense of humor. Still, all those customers look like they’re enjoying themselves.

I do fantasize, however. What if I’d won five million dollars?

Trust me, I’d buy a Minnesota cottage, a place big enough for a study overlooking some gorgeous reedy lake. And loons. We’d have to have loons—wouldn’t buy the place unless I could hear them. I’d need a boat, not a big one, just big enough to get out when I wanted to. I’d write and fish and clip the grass, trim the trees, keep up the flowers. We’d eat perch and walleye and maybe a bass snagged from a weed bed along the shore. Sounds good. My wife would love it.

Once I’d sign the lease on that lake home, I’d be packing. I have a few things I’d like to write before time winged chariot arrives. I’d start working once the computer was set up in that new office, the one with the windows.

“What god is so great as our God?” Asaph asks.

Easy for him to say. He lived in Israel, 600 B. C. What did he know about beer batter walleye or a half dozen fat perch? What did he know about the cry of the loon, the solitary pleasures of trolling along, a fishing line in the water at the moment the sun clears the eastern horizon?

It’s a rhetorical question. Asaph doesn’t mean for us to quibble, because the answer is axiomatic. “Why, no god is so great as our God—what an idiot question.”

I wish the answer were as easy as that. If it were, we’d live in a wholly different world. But the fact is, siren-like gods try to woo us from faith in our Maker, and often enough they do—too often, in fact, not because filthy lucre is itself that glorious but because it offers our dreams. Money puts big picture windows on our fantasies.

Believing in God isn’t all that difficult. Spirituality is hot today. Faith itself, it seems, is something of a must have.

But a life of holiness is a much tougher sell. Every moment of advertising preaches a different gospel, and we hear it 24/7. There are other gods, and they’re nothing to shake a stick at. Wish it weren’t so.

If it wasn’t, there’d be no more casinos, no more lotteries.