When I win the lottery…
I don’t understand why God won’t trust me with wealth. I have asked time and again. I have prayed about it. I have hoped for it. I have wished for it. I just don’t understand why.
It’s not that I’m poor. I don’t think I’ve ever been poor. Except for that time when I was a single mother without a job about the time I was losing my home. But even then I didn’t consider myself poor, I considered myself a poor money manager. I was never a good money manager. My mother was. She could make $10 stretch a mile. She always had money for you. Do you need $5 for your gas tank or for lunch? She would ask all the time. It wasn’t until years later I came to learn that she might have made $10 stretch from one payday to the next but if that was the case we usually ate dinner at my aunt’s house or my grandmother’s house. She might have made it stretch but she got a lot of help. So Mom was great at managing money. Unfortunately that was one thing she never passed along.
I can remember my grandmother not having any money after my grandfather died. She came and stayed at our house for awhile. Then she went to my aunt’s house. Then she came back to ours. Then she went home. She lived this rotation until she died. I always thought it was because she didn’t want to be alone. But in later years I discovered it also was because she didn’t have any income. None, whatsoever. She tried to get a job but at her age she couldn’t find anything. And she was too young for social security, even my grandfather’s social security. They changed the laws after she died.
But sometimes my mother would pay her way to the bingo. Mom was working more then. I remember one time Mama won $300 and you would have thought she was a millionaire.
I think I should win the lottery. I have good intentions. I think I would do right with all of that money. And I don’t need $300m or $400m. I would do well with just a mil. Of course, if I could win the major jackpots I could so so much more. I made up my mind that I really didn’t want to win the lottery. I made up my mind I wanted to earn that kind of money. So I sat down and thought how could I earn a couple of million dollars. I need to write a best seller. I know I’ve got three or four in me. I could do this. I know I can. Okay, then why don’t I?
I don’t know. But I’m not giving up.
This weekend at Mass, Fr. Darrell talked some about greed. He also talked about tithing. That got me thinking. As I was praying to win the lottery again because I could do some serious tithing with all those millions I came to realize I was going about it all wrong. All these years I’ve been putting the cart before the horse. I need to do the work and let the money take care of itself. I don’t need to plan what I’m going to do with all the money I win or earn or have given to me. I don’t need to plan any of it. All I need to do is the work. Plan the work and do the work. That’s what I need to do.
And then I got to thinking about money. Why in the world am I asking God to help me with money? God doesn’t deal in anything so petty. I should be asking God to make me rich in other ways. And then it hit me, in other ways I am LOADED.
God has given me a mate that still makes my heart flutter after 20 years. We may not agree on most things but we are so rich in love that our lifetime is not enough. We will need forever because that is how long our love will last.
God has gifted me 4 amazing children (to steal my daughter’s buzzword). If I was ever looking for anything to invest in being able to raise these children has been the best investment I have ever made. And I think I have been a good steward of them. I have nurtured and cared for them but have given them the freedom to be the wonderous people that they have become. There is not a day that goes by that I am not rich in their love and amazed at their love for their faith and their pride in spreading their love of faith. Yes if God has blessed me with the treasure of my family I’ll take this over become a gazillionaire.
I am rich in other ways as well. I am rich in my faith, I am rich in my friends (so, so many to count), I am rich in my health. But one other way that I am especially blessed is that God has allowed me live where I do. I was not raised on a farm. I was certainly not raised on a family farm. But watching the next generation playing and exploring and experiencing the farm last weekend has made my heart so rich that it could explode. I am so lucky to live here. And I am so lucky to be part of this totally functional dysfunctional family that God has blessed me with. And I pray that this farm will remain in their family for generations to come. I wonder if that even occurred to George when he helped John buy this farm in 1935?
But the greatest riches that I have in my life have so much to do with the faith community where I live. Being a part of the Fancy Farm community and the faith-life of St. Jerome Church is overwhelming. There is not a time when I go into that stretch of road that I don’t feel that I could not have it any better anywhere in the world. Whether I am attending Mass in church or in the chapel, whether I am having a funeral meal in the KC hall; whether I am participating in a youth activity or a spiritual retreat; or whether I have the privilege of praying the rosary at the grotto I can’t imagine anyone being richer than I am day in or day out.
So no, I’ll never have more money than I need. But I will be, like my mother before me and her mother before her, and a whole lot of other people I know, wealthy beyond measure in the love that I know belongs to me, and the faith that I have that no one can take from me. But I will be more than willing to tithe the money that I do have and to share the riches of love and faith and community with all that I see.
Oh and by the way, I am rich and famous. Everyone knows me as Jimmy’s wife or Jay, Carilynn, Katie or John’s mom, or Alexander’s mama, and I am rich in their love.