Some people challenge, entertain and enjoy themselves solving puzzles. Some love sudoku. My father-in-law loves golf and that drive to see how few hits it takes to get the ball in the hole. My brother likes to see how many catfish he can catch with his bare hands. I don't play golf, nor do I noodle. I love fantasy sports wagering. I have an app which lets me play against people all over and against the "house." The only difference between this and gambling is that it is free. I don't risk money nor win money. Otherwise, the point spreads are the same, and you make the same types of "wagers" as you would in Vegas. You risk stars instead of cash. I only go into so much detail because I know that while my issue is chemical, some are addicted to gambling. They couldn't play this game without soon wanting the rush of the real thing and the chance to win real money. I most certainly do not wish to encourage gambling to anyone who is bondage to that as I am to alcohol.
But with all that said, there is something that I realized today as I made my picks on the baseball games for the day. While I do make individual game wagers, I love parlays. For those who are unfamiliar with sports wagering, a parlay is a wager where you pick multiple games on one wager. For example, today I made a three game parlay, a four game, a five game, a six game and one big 15 game parlay. The payouts are nice if you hit, but here's the thing; you have to get every game right. If one team you chose to win loses, you lose. So, while you may only have to risk one star to win over a thousand on a 15 game parlay, even if you get 14 games right and miss one, you lose. It's all or nothing.
The rewards are great with larger parlays, but the odds are against you, because there are more chances for a single upset to cost you everything. While it may seem a little unfair, but I was so close, there's no difference between only getting one game right and only missing one game. If you don't pick them all right, you lose. I have hit a couple of 20 game parlays, and it's pretty exciting to me. I've missed many.
Life is like a decades long parlay. From the age of understanding to death, we all face many choices. If we get them all right, we parlay all those right choices into the ultimate win, eternal life. But even one wrong choice brings the total score to less than 100% right. It's a losing ticket. And it doesn't matter what we do today and tomorrow if we've already missed the mark. The pay out for perfection is glorious, but anything less than perfection is a loss. Period. Always. There are no curves or close enoughs. And we've all blown it. Some of us missed a lot of choices. Some have missed only a few. But only one has hit the parlay of life. Only one has walked in humanity without a single wrong choice.
I missed three games tonight. That means I picked 12 winners out of 15 games. I feel pretty good about that. But I didn't lose more or less than if I had missed all 15. I lost. Maybe you have a 90% positive record of right choices. If so, you probably feel like a pretty good person. Some of us aren't close to that and may feel horrible about ourselves. A good record looks better than a bad one, but it's the same result. Loss.
The good news is that God loves us as we are, not as we should be. He loves the people who almost never get it right as much as those who almost never get it wrong. He loves us all so much that He gave us His winning ticket in exchange for our losing ones. We can all claim the prize for winning the spiritual parlay. But you only get to turn in one ticker. You can either trade yours for His or keep yours. There's no point in continuing trying to win by choosing right, because the parlay is already blown with what happened yesterday. But if we make the trade, the payout isn't based on our performance but on His. And the payout, remember, is eternal life. It's all or nothing. So since we have already failed to get it all right, we must trade all, the good and the bad, of our ability with His and rely completely on the perfect work He did.
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