3

Praise Jesus!

His bets had come in. All of them. And they’d come in big.

Walter could not stop smiling. The small group of worshippers who attended Wednesday’s Bible Study were already in the meeting room, waiting, but the pastor could not seem to tear himself away from the FreshBets results page on his computer, where a bright green box was displaying the flashing number $2,000.

Two thousand dollars!

There were college games coming up this weekend, and one of them, as far as he was concerned, was a sure thing. He was definitely going to bet on it—he just wasn’t sure how much of his winnings he was going to roll over into that action.

Of course, the first thing he was going to do was put some of his winnings toward the church’s renovation fund. They’d been raising money for over a year to add new pews, re-roof the building and build a larger rec room for youth outreach. Five hundred dollars was a big chunk of change and would help a lot in reaching their goal. Norma Crenshaw and her crowd might refuse those ill-gotten gains if they knew where the money came from, but as far as he was concerned, it was like what happened in Guys and Dolls when Sky Masterson rolled the gamblers in the sewer for money against their attendance at the Salvation Army mission meeting. Using the wages of sin for a higher purpose, fighting fire with fire, as the Salvation Army general said. That’s what he was doing.

Although…

Maybe he shouldn’t give the church half. Maybe he should hold back a little bit more in order to…reinvest. If he could turn a hundred or two of that five into another thousand, that would be even better, and would help the church far more in the long run.

Walter could sense from the tenor of voices in the meeting room that his Bible study group was getting restless, so he took a last look at the proof of his winnings—

$2,000!

—before lifting the Bible from his desk and picking up his sheaf of notes about today’s topic. He opened the door to the meeting room, smiling broadly. “Good morning!” he said. “What a glorious day God has blessed us with!”

****

After the meeting, Doug Coats, who, appropriately enough for a man with his last name, owned both the dry cleaners in the Safeway center and the laundromat at the trailer park, hung back while the rest of the group said their goodbyes. When everyone had gone, he approached Walter, still standing in the doorway. “Pastor? Do you have a minute? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”

Walter had been yearning to get back to FreshBets, but Doug was a good guy, as well as one of the church’s top fundraisers, and this was his job, so he smiled in the most pastorly way he knew how and said, “Sure, Doug. What’s on your mind?”

“Tourists.”

“Tourists?”