Are You Playing Your Lottery Number?

A recent discussion with my young daughter revealed to me that our fears over the future begin incredibly early. She is only 9, and already she is fretting about what she will do for a job, what she'll "be" when she grows up. Not to brag about my own daughter, but this is a bright girl, whom I believe is very talented. Yet, there she was in front me of doubting her ability to provide for herself 13 years from now.

She can draw with such an understanding of color as to intimidate me. And this past Christmas, she opened the brand new guitar Santa gave her and began playing Jingle Bells all the way through, though she had never played a guitar before and only knew how to play Jingle Bells from piano lessons, a thoroughly different instrument and instruction! Surely, she will always be able to find, or better, to create work in art or music with her talent.

I remembered back to my own childhood and reminisced about what I loved to do and what inspired me. I had always loved to sing and would spend hours writing songs and singing them to my mother's adoring friends (bless them). And I also continuously came up with "ideas" to improve things, fix problems, or even make money.

And that is what we all share, our lost talents. It is your lottery number. Somewhere, at some time, you knew what you loved to do, and you did it with abandon and without self consciousness. We all did. It was our nature as children, before the doubts poured in, before other people's ideas of what we should do or be were told to us, and before judgments began.

Too many of us have forgotten the talents we were born with, the innate interests we had as children. That is your own personal lottery number, promised to you alone. And you misplaced it.

If you were given the lottery numbers for next week's million-dollar jackpot drawing, and were promised that if you played them, those numbers would come up, would you instead change a few of the numbers, believing you have a better combination? Would you give the numbers to someone else? Would you opt out of playing altogether, doubting in what you were told? Or would you trust implicitly in the one who told you to play those numbers, but put the information away for safekeeping? Or would you buy a ticket?

This game of chance is your life. And you were given your lottery number, exclusive to you, for you to trust and to play. The jackpot - true happiness, wealth, and doing what you love - is waiting for you to claim it. You just have to buy the ticket.