This anecdote – not sure if this happened for real – is very readable for its strong and never-truer message:
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A certain company had a tradition of holding a party beginning with a lottery every Christmas Eve.
The rules of the lottery draw were: each employee pays ten dollars as a fund. There were three hundred people in the company. In other words, a total of three thousand dollars could be raised. The winner takes all the money home.
On the day of the lottery draw, the office was filled with a lively atmosphere. Everyone wrote their nomination on the slips of paper and put them in the lottery box.
However, a young man hesitated when he wrote – he thought of the company’s cleaning lady, her sickly son needed a surgical procedure soon after the dawn of New Year and she had not yet raised the required funds for the hospitalization.
He knew the chance of winning was slim, a miniscule 0.3% percent. Yet he couldn’t help but write the name of the cleaner lady on the note.
The tense moment came. The boss gave the lottery box a vigorous shake and finally drew out a note. The man also kept praying in his heart: hoping against hope the cleaning lady wins the prize…When the winner was announced, the miracle had happened!
Yes, the winner turned out to be the cleaning lady. Cheers broke out in the office, and she hurriedly rushed to the stage to accept the award, almost breaking down in tears.
As the party kicked off, while thinking about this “Christmas miracle”, the man paced to the lottery box. He took out a piece of paper and opened it casually. The name on it was the name of the Cleaning lady! The man was very surprised. He took out several pieces of paper one after another. Although the handwriting on them was different, the names were all the same – it was the lady’s! The man’s eyes were filled with tears with the thought there was indeed a Christmas miracle in the world, but *the miracle will not fall from the sky – the people were required to create it by themselves!
***
Curiously enough this is also the message carried in our Sanatana Dharma. Here it is said: in this Kali Yuga, in observance of the yuga dharma, divinity presents itself always through an agency, human or otherwise, never ever manifesting directly.
End
Sanmargam 