She wasn’t sure if it was dogmatically proper, but last Friday night Sophie Rizavas prayed to Jesus for money.

The 63-year-old North York grandmother was juggling four jobs as a cleaning lady, while her husband drove airport limos. She wanted them both to retire.

“I said, please Jesus, send me some money,” Rizavas recalled. “I don’t need too much.”

The next day she won $50 million in the lottery.

“It was a miracle,” she laughed, speaking to reporters at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp.’s prize centre near Dundas Square on Tuesday. Rizavas said she’s always been a casual lottery player, but never in her wildest expectations — or prayers — thought she would win.

Now her working days are over. Beyond a family holiday with her husband, two adult kids and two grandchildren, Rizavas has no idea what she’s going to do with all that cash. She’s still trying to digest her new reality as a multimillionaire.

“I don’t know how I’m feeling. I’m so happy. I don’t even realize yet,” she said.

Rizavas was en route home from work Saturday when she decided to stop in at a nearby convenience store to check her Lotto Max ticket. She walked up to the counter and asked the man working to scan her ticket. The machine buzzed and flashed.

“He said, ‘I think it’s $10,000.” And I said, ‘I don’t think so, I think it’s $50,000.’ ”

Seconds later the store phone rang. It was someone from the OLG support centre. (As per OLG protocol, when a ticket that’s worth more than $5,000 gets scanned, the machine freezes and a representative calls the store within two minutes). That’s when Rizavas heard she’d actually won the Lotto Max jackpot: $50 million, plus an extra $5 for the Encore bonus on her ticket.

“He comes out from the counter and hugs me, and I said ‘Oh my God, $50 million!’ It’s unbelievable,” she said, adding that people in the store swarmed her to say congratulations, and she started crying.

“The retailer started crying as well,” she said.

Rizavas immigrated to Canada with her husband in 1970 — exactly 44 years to the day before she won the lottery, she said Tuesday.

She grew up in Athens, the only daughter to a father who worked in construction and a dressmaker mother.

On Mother’s Day, during an already-planned dinner with her children, she dropped the bomb that she had won $50 million in the lottery. Obviously, they were shell-shocked, Rizavas said. “We don’t know what is happening to us,” she said, shaking her head.

Rizavas said she doesn’t know what she’s going to do with that enviable hunk of change. Her plans at the moment are to enjoy retirement with her husband and spend as much time as possible with her grandchildren.

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And what of the list of lavish things that kind of money can buy? None of that is on her mind.

“I’m very good where I am. I love my car. I love my house,” she said. But she won’t be returning to work anytime soon. Unless it’s to visit co-workers.

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