When I was a kid I used to pick up all manner of bits of trash and rocks and little twigs and things that I found interesting and stuff them in my pockets. You never knew what might come in handy, a bottle cap became a Barbie plate, broken safety glass was diamonds, a feather could be stuck in the band of your straw cowboy hat.  Sometimes the trash picking paid off, sometimes you got cut fingers, or in one case when I was trying to take a red stick off an aerosol can, you got sprayed in the eye with an unknown chemical. It was kind of a meddler’s crapshoot.

One day I found two colorful tickets in the Kroger parking lot. They were yellow, with a picture of a jockey on them, and some grey areas with dollar amounts in them. Little bits of gravel and dirt were embedded in them, as they had been run over a few times. Eventually I figured out that they were scratch-offs. I had never heard of those, or seen one, our family not being the gambling sort. The tickets seemed sinful and forbidden, so into the coat pocket they went. I didn’t let Mom see me take them, she didn’t share my enthusiasm for dirty salvaged objects. Doubtless it made laundry day interesting for her too.

The next Sunday morning at church, Brother Bob preached a sermon against gambling. This was a topic I hadn’t heard preached about, so I paused in gazing at Joash’s nipples and lush armpit hair in the color art plate in my bible and listened.  In the grand tradition of the IFB churches we attended, usually if the sermon topic was a specific sin, someone in the congregation had a problem with said sin and was being called out from the pulpit in hopes of a dramatic altar call which would entertain while stroking the pastor’s ego.

No such drama occurred, it was a pretty sparse crowd kneeling at the altar, despite four dragging verses of Just As I Am being played pleadingly. I felt a little sorry for Brother Bob that he had gone to the trouble to practically publicly shame a parishioner with no payoff.

As I left the vestibule with my family, I stuck my hand in my coat pocket and rediscovered the scratch-offs. Eureka! “I’ll give ol’ Brother Bob a thrill”, I thought. I tore them in half and threw them on the ground just outside the church door.

That night at evening service, Brother Bob stood at the pulpit and triumphantly raised his chins. “Looks like someone was convicted from the sermon this morning”, he crowed, as he held aloft the scratch offs I had dropped.

My face turned scarlet. several thoughts ran through my mind at once. “He’s going to see my face and know I did it, I’m so glad no one saw me throw the tickets down because they’ll think I have a gambling problem, wow, it worked, I manipulated God’s anointed so easily, wow, he’s kind of gullible”. I never told a soul about my deception. I disliked being in trouble.

That was the most fun I’d had with one of my dirty little treasures. Sometimes the meddling and picking paid off. It was always a gamble.

 

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Memoir #church Memoir