"Making a living is different than making a life."
Maya Angelou
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."
Matthew 6:24
"Money doesn't grow on trees, kids."
my Mom
Funny, isn't that exactly where money grows? That's our paper source, and money is nothing more than fancied-up paper, no? And as we can see in our fumbling economy, the value of that paper is becoming less and less, reaching its ultimate insignificance. It's to the point where we don't even have anything tangible to show for it anymore. Our money has evolved into a miniscule tiny transaction somewhere in cyberspace.
Okay, so you tell me who gets the better deal: I walk into a store, and purchase a pair of running shoes for say, $100. I hand the cashier my credit card, she slides it, and I walk out with the shoes. Float above the scene for a minute, what did she even get from that? I'm leaving this establishment with a pair of shoes that I will use to go and live my life, to go out running, to take adventures in...whereas she and the company she is part of got a teeny tiny piece of intangible cyberspace. hmmm
I understand the monetary system was put into place to provide some sort of order in our nation's system. Thats all fine and good, in theory. And the US government is currently something like $14,500,000,000,000 in debt. Is that order? Oh, and the debt pieced up per US taxpayer totals around $129,644.
Clearly, as a nation, we have decided to serve money rather than God. Therefore, serving evil rather than good (1 Timothy 6:10). I am not proud to be part of a society that holds illusioned money at such high priority. It's embarrassing that we don't have control over this issue. Down every extravagant avenue, every glitzy boulevard, money makes the time tick, money gets people up in the morning, money is the heart of this society. And we have numbly accepted this as our medium. Ginormous shopping malls, extreme consumerism, killing over money, disregarding your co-citizens for your own success, all with a side dish of ever-growing debt.
Back to Angelou. Living your life does have to do with work. But what you're working for, is the matter at hand. Don't work for money, it's a dead end for the spirit, it's a void. With your life rife with money, you have to continuously deny your spirit and the good of your heart; it's a cold fact. We should be working for a purpose, for an outcome other than money. It is our instinct as humans to have that sense of purpose in our lives, and that's what our work should provide for us. It may sound highly naive for you as an individual to mount this challenge, but imagine if the all 307 billion people living in America (that's just America alone) would choose to work for something with a greater purpose. How different our nation would be! We would be a God-serving, God-fearing nation, as our founding fathers intended. The values this country began on said nothing about stepping on your brother's face on the way up your own money mountain. And, no matter how much money is at the top of it, it'll be a blackened dead peak; the only green at the top of it will be your useless dollars and your envy for those with a truly rich spirit.
If you died today, are you absolutely certain that you would go to heaven? You can be! TRUST JESUS NOW
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