People Love Money More than God

God says, “Peo­ple spend their lives chas­ing after mon­ey and fame; they clutch at these straws, think­ing they are their only means of sup­port, as if by hav­ing them they could live on, exempt from death. But only when they are about to die do they real­ize how dis­tant these things are from them, how weak they are in the face of death, how eas­i­ly they shat­ter, how lone­ly and help­less they are, with nowhere to turn. They real­ize that life can­not be bought with mon­ey or fame, that no mat­ter how wealthy a per­son may be, no mat­ter how lofty their posi­tion, all are equal­ly poor and insignif­i­cant in the face of death. They real­ize that mon­ey can­not buy life, that fame can­not erase death, that nei­ther mon­ey nor fame can length­en a person’s life by a sin­gle minute, a sin­gle sec­ond. The more peo­ple feel this way, the more they yearn to keep on liv­ing; the more peo­ple feel this way, the more they dread the approach of death. Only at this point do they tru­ly real­ize that their lives do not belong to them, are not theirs to con­trol, and that one has no say over whether one lives or dies—that all of this lies out­side of one’s con­trol.”