July 27, 2025

The Lotto 649 ad encourages you to just imagine. Imagine if you were fortunate enough to live in your dream house. To have everything you need. Your environment was comfortable and beautiful. The temperature was always right. You didn’t lack for anything you had plenty of good food to eat and enjoy with your perfect partner. What more could you possible want? I don’t know what your life situation is now but you probably have moments where you stop and think of how things could be better. This is why the lotto ads are so powerful because no matter how good we might have it the world is not a perfect place. It’s important to point out that lots of money won’t suddenly make the world perfect, even if it could solve some of the problems you or I are dealing with. 

Now imagine instead of thinking ahead to a time when things might get better you could think back to a time when they were perfect. That doesn’t sound sensible to many but that’s exactly the situation Adam and Eve found themselves in. They could remember when the world was perfect. When there was meaningful but not onerous work, when nothing hurt you and nothing hurt. I wonder if Adam in his eight hundred and fiftieth year as he bent low over some weeds to pull them out of his plot of ground thought back to when he lived in a perfect garden where no weeds grew and where his back didn’t fatigue from pulling them. If he stood up sometimes and remembered when joints didn’t ache. If he felt the sun hot on his sweaty face and remembered when it didn’t burn and when none of the plants had thorns and nothing was trying to kill you and your loved ones. Perhaps to Adam it was like the Lotto ad “just imagine” but instead “just remember.” We don’t know how many children Eve may have had but I can imagine her wanting what was best for them just as all mothers do. Then thinking what it might have been like raising children in a perfect place where she didn’t have to always be concerned about what kind of life they would have because she knew it would be wonderful. Did the pain of each new birth remind her of the pain those children would experience in the world? How many times did she think back and ask why did I listen to that wicked snake? How did I fall for it, why did I think there could possibly have been more or better than the beauty and joy we had? 

Such is the situation we all put ourselves in when we fail to trust God. God want’s our best and reveals his truth to that end. When we don’t believe him and obey him in trust we are doing the very thing Adam and Eve did. How sad it would be for us to one day think why didn’t I trust God?

Kevin Cleary