Stop worshipping DUST — Kara Payton
Next to NOTHING we do here matters and there are things & people in your world worth dying for that you compulsively hold a phone in front of.
The concept of time has been thrust into my mind by three invitations. One of which was a question asked by my friend Sean Whalen. I accepted, and had a staggering reality spill down my back like cold water.
“What if you don’t live a full life?” For the first time, I was gloves off with the possibility that I could only live to be 50…or 40…or 37.
The next was the sudden ending of Jessie Lee’s life. She was younger than me. And I took for granted that we were “connected” online and never told her something I had always loved about her that helped me become more me.
The most recent, was the passing of one of my closest friends.
“If she has somehow known in January that this is the last year of her life,” I thought to myself, “if I knew I was going to be gone by the end of this year…”
The idea came in waves and each hit me with a different perspective over the last month.
I wasted some of it in ruminating the past. I spent some of it in reflection, contrasting then & now. I then invested it deeply into the present moment and immersed myself in the gift of my life. And after she took her last breath, I understood that all of these make up what it means to be human.
What was funny to me was that the way we operate with time made up the word “WISH.”
W- Waste. Wasting time as if it is forever replenishing.
I — Invest. Investing time that we cannot get back for a worthy cause or to deepen our future.
S — Spent. Spending the only moment we have in understanding that we only have now.
H — Human. The human condition that stumbles and dances between all of these in life.
I stepped out of a season that was incredibly challenging only to enter into another that seems it will be equally as challenging. (Perhaps you can relate.) It seems as though there won’t be a break between waves, a breath between growing pains, a calm before another storm. What I think I know is there is a purpose. A purpose in a season of brokenness, a season of tearing flesh, a season of surrender. I asked God to help me find faith again. He has swept me out to sea, far away from the shore of my comfort zone, and the depths I can stand in and control. You ask God for faith, and He will strip everything else you put your faith in besides Him so faith will find you stripped, open, and raw.
Nearly everything we put our faith in, seek comfort in, and think we can control…is dust. We live in a time that lulls ourselves into a dizzy narcissistic fantasy. This self-obsessed God complex makes us think we don’t need anything but the idols we build in our social & financial status.
And all it is, is our own soul’s ransom. We worship, sleep with, and sacrifice our lives for worthless sewage in the light of eternity.
We are literally building our own prisons.
These prisons will become our graves.
Ask yourself, if you were given days to live, what in your life would be worth dying for?
And what of the rest of it?
You don’t owe loyalty to anything or anyone who asks your life to remain loyal to dust.
Put your fucking phone down. Next to NOTHING we do here matters and there are things & people in your world worth dying for that you hold a phone in front of.
You have LIFE. Go LIVE. Go LOVE your LIFE. Go LOVE the PEOPLE in your LIFE.
DEEPLY.
FULLY.
Abandon the rest.
xx
K
Originally published at https://www.karapayton.com on October 17, 2023.
