The word luck is not in your Bible. Not once.
I checked this morning. Luck, lucky, unlucky, fortune. Every one of them comes back empty. A book that runs from the making of the world to the end of it, and it never once calls a man lucky.
It is not silent about the thing, though. It has a name for the man who sorts his days into safe and unsafe, who wakes up and decides the date on the wall is against him. The Bible puts that man in hard company.
"There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch." (Deuteronomy 18:10)
An observer of times. That is the old name for it. The man who reads the day instead of the One who made it. He watches the calendar the way a sailor watches a bad sky, hunting for the number or the morning that spells doom. Scripture sets him down in the same breath as the witch and the one who burns his own child. Not because checking a date is as black as murder, but because it grows from the same root. Both of them have stopped trusting God with the next hour and gone looking for the levers somewhere else.
Here is where it turns, and it turns on one word.
The observer says his times belong to the day, to the number, to whatever drift he cannot see.
David said the opposite. "My times are in thy hand." (Psalm 31:15)
Not in the thirteenth of the month. Not in the black cat or the ladder. In the hand that made the month and the cat and the man walking under the ladder. Your times are held. They are not loose in the air for a Friday to spoil.
Now somebody is already reaching for the exception. The Bible does say time and chance. And it does. "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong... but time and chance happeneth to them all." (Ecclesiastes 9:11) The world does not run on a track you can see from the ground. The fast man loses. The strong man falls. From under the sun it can look like a coin toss.
But watch what the same book does with the coin. "The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD." (Proverbs 16:33) You throw the dice. God sets them where they land. What looks like chance from under the sun is a hand from above it. There is no such thing as luck. There is a God you can see working and a God you cannot, and both of them are Him.
So it is the thirteenth, and it is a Friday, and somewhere a grown man is taking the long way around a ladder to reach a job he hates.
You were not made to live like that.
"This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." (Psalm 118:24)
He made the day. Not luck. Go and be glad in it.
