And he continued with this story, “There was a couple whose numbers came up in the lottery. They thought: ‘What shall we do? For we love our old house, and couldn’t bear to move. We don’t have much but we do have all we need; there is nothing we want to buy.’ So they planned: ‘We’ll give this cash away. Not one thing will we buy.’ And that is what they did. To hospitals, aid agencies, churches, emergency services, and cemeteries the cash went. Not forgetting some whom they loved who needed a little help. After three months, they said to themselves: ‘Now it’s gone we can rest for we’re plain folks who need nothing more than we’ve got.’ But God said to them: ‘Fools to the world you may be, but you are rich in what counts.’ This is the lot of those who know where contentment is, and nothing will ever end their blessedness. And strangely, in a capitalist world fuelled by relentless wants, the tale is true.
Allen and Violet Large of Lower Truro in Nova Scotia, Canada won a lottery prize of $10.9m in July 2010, by November they had given $10.2m of it away.
