Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

• Matthew 16:25-26

Our people must learn to devote themselves to doing what is good, in order to provide for urgent needs and not live unproductive lives.

• Titus 3:14

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

• 2 Corinthians-12:9

When we first got married, my wife was soon invited to a friend’s house.  My wife had babysat their children.  My wife dragged me along.  She carried with her a Mason jar with about twenty dollars in pennies, nickels, and dimes.  I asked her what that was for.  She said that we would be playing a friendly game of poker.  Since my wife had this sixth sense when it came to cards, I figured that we might break even.

The evening was marked by a great many laughs, and our jar was more full upon leaving as it was when we had gotten there, but I chalked it up to the dimes and nickels being turned into pennies.  Heavier but probably less cash value.

This one night turned into something that recurred many times over until I was about to get my graduate degree and get orders to report for military service (as it happened, on the same day).  Our jar was now completely filled with nickels, dimes, and pennies.  My wife never admitted at the time that she threw her spare change in the jar, but later in life I found that she did so.  That night was the same amount of laughter, just a friendly game among friends, but the outcome was decidedly different.

The entire thing, every previous visit was, for them, a research project.  If I had been playing golf with them, it would have been called “sand-bagging,” or losing on purpose to learn every “tell” that we had and that we did not know about.

Each hand that night was cut-throat.  If my wife or I had a decent hand, they would fold.  If they had a good hand and they detected we were bluffing, they raised, raised, again, and then asked for the maximum bet to be lifted.  By the end of the night, a brutal night, they had won all our winnings back, cleaned out the twenty dollars in the jar, and the possible additional twenty dollars that my wife added with using the jar to store her loose change, and cleaned out my wife’s purse for roughly another twenty dollars.

So, I could say that I only lost sixty dollars, back roughly fifty years ago when sixty dollars could buy more than it does now.  I could say it was worth the entertainment.  I cannot say that we drank their iced tea and soft drinks because my wife usually brought that kind of thing with her.  She was taught in the European tradition that when you visited someone, you never arrived empty handed.  So, maybe seventy dollars for entertainment, adding ten dollars of liquid refreshment.

We were invited one more time, but I told my wife what they had been doing.  She got upset with me.  They were good friends.  They would never do that.  But she could not explain how we lost sixty dollars in one night, them always knowing when to fold.  My wife thought her poker face was unreadable.  I made no such claims.

But I had distrust.  When playing golf, I never played with those guys who made side bets.  I was taught that you never gamble what you cannot afford to lose.  The couple remained friends of my wife.  We did not even lose that, but I was not chasing that idea of a friendly poker game.  That was not what that was.

God is sufficient.  He provides our needs.  And why does He so rarely provide more than our needs?  He stores our treasures in Heaven.  If we store them here, we cannot take them with us.  In storing them in Heaven, we enjoy them forever.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.