Losing Money and Wasting Life

I’m currently visiting Scarborough in North Yorkshire. It is a traditional British seaside town, with a nice beach, ice cream sellers aplenty and good, old fashioned donkey rides. Like its rivals elsewhere on the coast, it occasionally receives some sunshine. Lancastrian readers may find it helpful to compare it with Blackpool. A little smaller perhaps, but with dramatic cliffs and a stunning castle.

It also lacks those huge parties of wild fishwives celebrating ‘hen nights’; drunkards and smack-heads are notable by their absence. In the evenings, the prom is illuminated- not by strings of coloured light bulbs, but by the enticing glow of the amusement arcades. Inside, hundreds of slot machines sparkle and throb, boasting huge jackpots and rewards. My companions were mindful to enter but I explained that I am disinclined to gamble (one can read an excellent article on gambling in this month’s Evangelical Times by Stephen Rees, pastor of Grace Baptist in Stockport). I was therefore given a pound’s worth of two-penny pieces on the basis that as it isn’t my money, I’m not gambling. This policy is followed by successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, so on that basis, I accepted, and began to fritter.

At the coin-pusher machines, piles of coins are laden onto a surface. By rolling a new coin onto the moving surface above, one hopes to dislodge the coins into falling down, from where they can be collected. My donated one pound yielded 42 pence of gained coin, which was reinvested into the machine. I therefore made an overall loss of £1.42. So I lost more than I started with- or rather did my kind benefactor.

If these arcades are a fitting picture of this life’s garish and tawdry pleasures, the machines inside represent the cost thereof. Life without Christ, though seemingly offering temporary rewards and benefits, always proves too costly in the end. One loses the initial investment as well as the few profits it generated. Last night, I wasted someone else’s money. In Christ, thank God, the Christian can never waste a life, no matter how obscure and insignificant.

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Mark 8:36-37