Tonight’s chat with a dear friend of mine reminded me of a lesson I learned a few years ago, when I went ape nuts clicking every blue link I could find at iWon.com in a bid to become independently wealthy and attract me some hot gold digging babes. I was on a mission to win something, ANYTHING from iWon’s site, so I could pay my bills, quit my job, and at long last tell my boss to go blow it out his own arse.

I also signed up for these gaming sites too in the hopes that I would become some kind of gaming master and win hundreds of dollars in cash prizes. Instead, I would win $1.50… then lose $2.00, win $4.00, then lose $5.00, and on and on.

For three weeks I was at it, playing games, click click clicking, playing some more games, then click click clicking, then play iWon’s slot machine, then click click clickity click click clicking, until my fingers started to sprain. By the end of the third week I was a few dollars in the hole and my fingers looked liked they belonged to the Elephant Man. I wasn’t getting anywhere. As usual, luck was never a lady with me, and in the end I finally gave up.

The next day I went to work, and as I was signing in, somebody handed me an envelope.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“That’s your raffle prize.”

“My…. what??”

“Every year we raffle off the profits from the soda machines, and everyone is automatically entered. You were one of the winners, so that’s your share. 25 bucks.”

I just stood there, blown away by having finally won something, and especially at the timing of it all. I had spent the last three weeks trying to win every prize imaginable at iWon, and failing miserably at that, and now came this, a $25 prize for a raffle I never even knew existed. I still have that envelope by the way, with the money still inside.

There’s an old joke where a man prays to God to win the lottery and the Lord tells him to go buy a lottery ticket first. In my case even that part had already been taken care of. It was a sobering lesson straight from heaven, and one I had sadly forgotten over the years. As much as I’d like to believe God to rain His blessings on my life without requiring any effort on my part except to receive it, I still strive in my own strength to create my own success, and no matter how many times I fail, that lesson never seems to fully sink in for me. It’s been especially true these past few weeks, as I try to cram as much knowledge as I can find into my poor little brain so I can utilize it all to make money off the Internet, whether through my blog or elsewhere. There’s so much information to sift through, so little time to digest it all, and not enough brainpower on my part to take what I know and transform myself into the self sufficient man that I’ve always longed to be.

And yet I seem to leave no room for God in any of this. I’m trying to do it all on my own strength, relying on the world’s wisdom and philosophies, when instead I should be casting these burdens on Him, and trusting Him to once again provide that envelope of blessings when I truly need it. That’s something no professional blogger or Internet mogul will ever tell you either. But it’s the secret to real success, real peace and freedom from worry, learning that it really is all under His control. If I succeed in this new mission I’ve made for myself, it will not be because of my talents or skills or luck, but only, and ONLY, because God is gracious in His blessings towards me.

By the way, I do intend to use the prize money I won someday… specifically for when I finally meet the girl of my dreams.

My boss had been playing games with me for the better part of a month now, from denying my proposed work schedule so I couldn’t attend law school, to threatening me over my request for accommodations because of my hearing disability. Naturally there have been days when I wished a meteor would land on his head (and those were the times when I was actually in a good mood too.)

For the past week he’s been AWOL as a result of training in another section for “overtime,” perfectly understandable to me given his 6 figure salary and his evidently pressing need to pay off his yacht and summer home. Poor guy. One particular night he left in a hurry without signing off his computer, and being the fine, upstanding person that I was, I did the only thing I could think of.

I fired up his inbox and quickly started rummaging through his emails and folders.

I could practically hear the digital clock from 24 thunderously ticking away in the background as I furiously performed a search query of all his emails, hoping to find something, ANYTHING, to give me an idea of what he might have been planning against me. I kept one eye on the doorway the whole time too, half scared to death that he would walk in on me at any moment, but I bravely (or maybe recklessly) pressed on.

Nothing.

I didn’t even show up on this guy’s radar. There were no emails about me, not even anything juicy about our division, even though everything in our section was falling to crap ever since he took over. Great, only in the movies can a guy pull a stunt like I did and be rewarded with some juicy intel, like finding out who REALLY killed JFK. @#$%!

I did find out that he was having an affair though. I guess that’s something.