I was not sleeping enough, eating well, or enjoying life as any healthy and happy person should be. Instead, I was consumed by an obsessive, competitive spirit; the fear of failure, and a never quenching thirst for success. Disputing the spot for the highest-ranking GPA in the entire school was costing me my sanity and general well-being. I was thirteen years old and was already burning the candle at both ends. But what is worst, I had fallen into the sin of idolatry. And my idols were leading me down a very dark path.
A genuine love for learning had turned into a deadly dagger that pierced my judgement all the way to through the core of my conscience. It had, in a spiritual sense, left me on the floor; bleeding, gasping for air, fighting for life. Because that is the way false idols treat their worshipers. They leave you feeling anxious, sad, lost, confused, and empty. All the hard work and dedication I put in at school that year was at the end for nothing. By a decimal thousandth, I came in second. But even if I had made it to the first place, it would have not been worth it.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”
We were created to worship. It’s a natural instinct. It’s written down with indelible ink on the inner walls of our DNA sequence. It is engraved on every layer of our bones, intertwined with every fiber of our muscles, manifested into every breath we take. This innate need to worship is not just part of who we are, it is the footprint of our identity. But just as each type of molecule in our body was made for a specific type of receptor, so was our heart created for a specific Object of worship. That is why, when there is a slight distortion in the focus of that worship; chaos breaks loose inside and everything outside spirals out of control.
Good and noble pursuits can in the blink of an eye turn into idols the moment they get misplaced on the throne of our heart. Anything or anyone that does not belong there will, when forced into it only inject pain, suffering and death into our veins. God is the only one who can do just the opposite. He is the only one who can breathe life into an otherwise pointless existence. Because that is the way God treats His worshipers. Unlike false idols, He fills his them with joy, clarity, purpose, and a sense of peace that surpasses all understanding.
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