The prize we all dream of. The payday we all hope will happen, even if we never take the necessary steps to make it occur. The lottery. That is today’s exercise. Exercise number 14 out of this journey is, “what would you do with your lottery winnings?” I have to admit to start off with though, that I am not generally money driven. I just don’t do things for money. And I rarely if ever buy a lottery ticket. I do not bet on things that I don’t already know I can win. I take risks yes, but I don’t gamble.
Let’s suspend all sorts of disbelief though and for the sake of argument we’ll assume that I did win the lottery. There are three basic areas that I would want to cover, and the first starts with giving some of that money away. After that we will cover a few trinkets and experiences I covet, and then will put all the rest away for the future. But first things first..
The first expenditure may sound odd, especially for anyone not from around here, but Charleston in the summer is hot. Heck, the winter is often hot too. One of my favorite places in this world to spend time is in our church. It feels like home. And our church doesn’t have air conditioning. The initial bricks for the building were first put down in 1774. Yes, before the Revolutionary war although the construction was not finished until long after. When you have something that old it’s a little hard to retrofit with the modern convenience of air-conditioning. Hard means expensive. So that is the first thing I would d0 – I would pay to put air conditioning in the church. Tell you what though, if I’m going to air conditioning the church this better be a pretty big lottery. I think the running estimate for air conditioning our church is somewhere around a cool $2 million.