Anyone remember the “Good Old Days”?
You know the days when the All Blacks actually won the World Cup? 1987. Two
years after the Rainbow Warrior was sunk by the French, we got them back. Sweet
Justice.
It was later that same year the World
Stock Market crashed, so if we’re going to win this year, be warned! The All
Blacks are 7/4 odds on favourites to win. I’m just saying. The Lottery of Life.
I’m going to tell you about a man named Frane Selak, probably the luckiest man
alive.
Frane Selak was born in Croatia in 1929
– coincidentally the year of the previous great World Stock Market crash. Frane
is like the proverbial cat with nine lives, famous for his number of escapes
from fatal accidents.
The first of his numerous near-death
experiences was on a cold January day in 1962, when Frane was on a train to
Dubrovnik: it suddenly derailed into an icy river, killing 17 passengers. He
managed to escape with a broken arm, minor scratches and bruises.
A year later, Frane was flying, from
Zagreb to Rijeka, when a door abruptly blew away from the cockpit of the plane,
as he was blown off the plane! The accident killed 19 people, however, Frane
was lucky enough to land on a haystack, and wake up some days later in
hospital, with minor injuries.
It was in 1966 that he met with the
third misadventure while traveling on a bus that crashed and plunged into a
river. There were four people dead. Astonishingly, Frane managed to escape
unharmed again.
In 1970, Frane was driving along when,
all of a sudden, his car caught fire. He was fortunate again to have left the
car before the fuel tank exploded.
Three years later, another of Frane's
car caught fire, blowing flames through the air vents. There is no mention in
the story whether anyone was travelling in the car with him. Probably not I'd
say!
In 1995, Frane was in Zagreb when he
was hit by a bus, again leaving nothing but a few injuries.
The following year, while driving
through a mountain road, Frane drove off a guardrail to escape an oncoming
truck and landed on a tree to watch his car explode 300 feet below.
Someone must have told Frane to buy a
lottery ticket. You guessed it, in 2003, Frane won the million-dollar Croatian
lottery turning him into either the world's unluckiest man, or the world's
luckiest one depending on whether you are a glass half-empty or half-full kind
of person!
We live in a world where random things
happen to everyone – the good, the bad and the ugly. A wise man in the Bible
once observed “11 I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does
food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favour to the learned; but
time and chance happen to them all. 12 Moreover, no one knows when
their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in
a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.”
Ecclesiastes 9:11-12
We all would like security in our
lives, not just to rely on dumb luck to get us through. God has made a promise
to take care of us and give eternal life to anyone who will believe in Jesus, and
he cannot lie. He is the only one who can deliver on a promise – everything
else is chance. Take his Word for it.
