Everybody, Always

flash and a few red tickets roll out of the game. You can cash in these
tickets for prizes at a booth near the door if you want to.
I’d been taking my kids to this pizza place for years, and we’d spend
most of our time playing Skee-Ball. We got pretty good at it. Only a few
of the balls I rolled flew through nearby store windows. We saved up all
our tickets in a shoebox for a long time so we could trade them in
someday and get something really terrific. Finally, after years of
collecting tickets, I went to the prize counter with my box of tickets. I bet
I had a thousand of them. I thought I was going to get a Porsche. I shoved
the red tickets across the counter like they were salmon and I was the
captain of a big Alaskan fishing boat.
The guy behind the counter counted my tickets once and recounted
them to make sure he got it right. When he was all done, you know what
they gave me? A pencil! That was all I got in exchange for almost a
thousand tickets. And the pencil didn’t even have an eraser. He said that
would be five hundred more tickets. I walked away mumbling, “Curse
you, pizza dude!” What I didn’t know until I finally got to the prize
counter was all these tickets I’d been saving up for years were utterly
worthless.
People who are becoming love stop collecting tickets. They don’t do
nice things for Jesus thinking they’ll get a bunch of tickets they can trade
someday for an eraser full of grace. This is because they don’t think grace
is something we can trade good conduct for. They don’t take the bait and
collect what has no value to God. They shun all the attention because they
don’t need it anymore. They realize bright lights don’t need spotlights.
Instead, they see every act of selfless love as a declaration of their faith.
They’ve come to see love as its own reward simply because it pleases
God.
These same people who are becoming love stop keeping track of other
people’s tickets too. Instead of evaluating what others are doing, they see
them as people who are on their own adventure with God. They don’t stop
counting because they don’t care; they’re just so busy engaging in what