Our surety is in our confidence that we are indeed dwellers in Truth and Love, man's eternal mansion. Such a heavenly assurance ends all warfare, and bids tumult cease for the good fight we have waged is over, and divine Love gives us the true sense of victory. "They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of Thy house; and Thou shalt make them drink of the river of Thy pleasures."

—Mary Baker Eddy, Pulpit and Press, p. 3

"BE READY always to give an answer," the Bible says, "to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you..." (I Pet. 3:15). Suppose you found yourself telling someone who asked you your reason for hope that it was because everyone has a 1 in 13,983,816 chance of experiencing God's goodness?

According to the promoters of Britain's national lottery, those numbers represent the odds of winning the lottery's big prize. Obviously they do not represent a very compelling reason to have hope! They do, however, serve to illustrate the very nature of any hope that's based on material circumstances. And just in case lottery players are tempted to take comfort in the thought that their money is going to good causes, the promoters disclose that only 28 percent of the money collected from the 13,983,815 losing tickets finds its way to charitable projects. These points, taken together, prompted one anonymous commentator to classify the national lottery as "a tax on people who are bad at math" (www.quotegarden.com).

Nowadays, most people take government-run lotteries for granted; over 100 countries across the globe have them. The UK National Lottery is second in sales worldwide, trailing only Japan's bank lottery. In North America, every Canadian province, 42 US states, the District of Columbia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands conduct lotteries.

And yet lotteries, casinos, and other forms of public gaming come with personal and social costs. According to a coalition of Christians addressing a UK Parliamentary Committee during passage of a recent gambling bill, those social costs include child truancy, marital stress, family breakdown, and increased criminal activity. And when it comes to problem gambling, truly no man (or woman) is an island. "We have had statistics that one problem gambler can affect up to ten people in the immediate family," noted Jennifer Hogg, representing the Evangelical Alliance.

Most people would agree that gambling habits leading to family breakdown and the undermining of community cohesion constitute problem gambling, and need prevention or cure. But there's an aspect to all forms of gambling that, it could be argued, makes any gambling "problem gambling" — the spiritual truism that when you say yes to investing resources in the outcome of a horse race, a fruit machine [slot machine in the United States], or a card game, you are also investing the God-given quality of hope in the godless dance of chance.

That's not to imply that an occasional modest flutter [a casual bet] is in the same "problematic" league as a physical addiction. But hope—and the faith in good with which it is often associated— is too valuable a commodity to squander. Take a mental step back from the scale of an action to simply view the thought underlying it, and the fact becomes evident that all gambling rest on the promise of trusting in a good that will fall randomly in favor of oneself, at the expense of someone else. Or vice versa.

Further, if good can fall randomly in one's favor, then so can its opposite. As gambler Nathan Detroit sings in the musical Guys and Dolls,

What never runs out (in both uses of the phrase!) is God's love, the prize that's at once ever present and inexhaustible. Describing the nature of "inexhaustible divine Love" in her book on the spiritual laws of life, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need" (p. 494). Her next sentence offers a reason for hope in Spirit instead of matter, no matter what your circumstances: "It is not well to imagine that Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal only for a select number or for a limited period of time, since to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good" (p. 494).

Steering our hopes in the direction of divine Love, trusting God's ability and willingness to meet everyone's needs, including your own—and at all times—is actually a kind of prayer. Praying in this way turns self-centered hope, of which gambling is just one specific example, on its head. It opens the doors of expectancy to God's abundant goodness, which is always there for one and all, without exception.

The prayer of higher hope also exposes the so-called "laws of chance" and shows that they aren't laws at all. They actually represent the very opposite of law, since they claim to act in one way for "winners" and another way for "losers." Imagine if the law of gravity worked that way, and at the spin of roulette wheel Aunt Bertha suddenly takes off and hits the ceiling, while Cousin Joe can't lift either foot from the floor!

In order for a law to be authentic, it has to act impartially. God's unchanging goodness is the basis of the laws of Christian healing that Mrs. Eddy discovered in the teachings of Jesus and called Christian Science. And having confidence in this law of good is a healing prayer that can rescue even an addict from his/her gambling habit (see, for example, my own account of healing in the article "Taking the sure route away from gambling," which appeared in the Sentinel of November 11, 1991).

While the mental shift that exchanges confidence in luck for confidence in God's law can bring freedom to those tempted to gamble, it also has beneficial repercussions for people who would never think of parting with their hard-earned cash in that way. There are ways in which "Lady Luck" claims to define all lives, even life itself. For instance, in recent years there has been increasing discussion of a so-called "postcode lottery" in the UK, in which people receive varied quality of public services, such as healthcare and schooling, depending on the location of their home. (Differences are even more pronounced when the contrast is between public services in industrialized and developing nations.)

However, "Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal" for "all mankind and in every hour." This promises that spiritually based solutions are available to all, regardless of their individual circumstances or postal code or nationality. Consider the accounts of healing published in this magazine alone over the past 108 years. They represent many thousands of proofs that freedom from disease and deprivation, found through the Christ—the healing activity of God—is as universal and diverse as is the human family.

Heredity and genetics are further expressions of the "life is a lottery" belief system. But these belief systems, too, are contestable in prayer. As the Bible's first chapter establishes, God is creation's single and wholly good source of life. God knows how to respond to each individual need of His sons and daughters with precision, and His response is unopposable. On this basis of dependable divine benefaction, and the powerlessness of evil to prevent it, health and intelligence are understandable and provable as spiritually endowed qualities. Never for a moment tied to the chance condition of human parentage, they form the expression of everyone's sure relationship to God.

Because of our spiritual relationship to God—as His/Her child—there is no need for wishful hope. God creates everything in perfect balance. Why hope for health, happiness, and provision, when we already have them, and can prove through prayer that we have them? They are effects of divine sonship or daughterhood, which spiritual growth increasingly brings to light.

Day by day, though, it is right to be hopeful. And we can be, because God is always at hand to unveil a solution to our needs. Imagine what happens when, instead of misdirecting our hope toward the material god of chance, we redirect it to the spiritual certainty found in the Christ. What a force for good that is in the world, fostering faith in God's universal dependability. Imagine, too, what this mental shift is producing and will produce—in renewed family harmony, restored health, and constant sufficiency for individuals and families.

Planting her own trust on "the rock," on the Science of Christ, Mary Baker Eddy pinpointed what could be called an "upward spiral," in sharp counterpoint to the downward spiral of chancy, material living. "Christian Science," she explained, "despoils the kingdom of evil, and pre-eminently promotes affection and virtue in families and therefore in the community" (Science and Health, pp. 102—103).

The Epistle of James so eloquently assures us, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (1:17). The less we hope for good on the basis of chance, and thereby gain freedom from the belief that humanity is subject to evil on that same basis, the more our lives can spiral upward. With grateful awe, we will glimpse, and be able to increasingly prove, the fact that life is not a lottery —financial, postcode, genetic, or otherwise—but a glorious gift of goodness from our consistent, all-powerful, all-loving, infinitely generous, and impartial Parent.

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