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Key Bible Verse: They set an ambush for themselves; they booby-trap their own lives (Proverbs 1:18). Bonus Reading:Proverbs 1:17–19

Compulsive gambling begins with winning. But eventually things change, shifting to losing and then to chasing. Chasing is insidious, for, to the gambler, the only way to recapture his losses is to keep up the activity that produced them in the first place!

Dr. Linda Chamberlain illustrates the chase to her Regis University students by employing an old bar trick: she auctions off a ten-dollar bill. The catch is: While the highest bidder gets the ten spot, the second-highest bidder also has to pony up. "I've never failed on a ten-dollar bill to make less than 50 dollars," she says. "Usually I stop them at about 200." She starts the bidding at a dollar, and people start dropping out at six dollars, eight dollars, until there are two left. One of the two bids nine dollars, which is a good price—he still makes a dollar, after all. But when the other bids nine-fifty, the nine dollar bid doesn't look so good. If that bidder drops out at that point, he's out nine dollars. So he stays in.

"And that's what happens in gambling," Chamberlain says. "People get locked into that spiral, and that's how it begins to go. The whole sense of the chase is what really begins to hook people."

—Tom Raabe in House of Cards

My Response: Do I really believe that there is such a thing as luck?

Thought to Apply: Sure, anybody you see more than twice.

—A dealer at Caesar's (asked if he could spot a losing gambler)

Adapted from: House of Cards (Focus on the Family, 2001) by permission.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Father, may I rely only on Your loving guidance and provision—never on chance or fate.

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