blowing up the Peeps in your life

Some of you are probably only reading this because you saw the title and thought, "WTF." I assure you there is a purpose though. I got the idea about a week ago, but haven't had the time to just sit down and write this. I was at church and the pastor was trying to come up with a visualization for the Easter service message. One guy jokingly suggested a row of microwaves and a ready supply of Peeps. Why? To nuke them. Despite its highly commercialized association with Easter, the "Easter" bunny is actually a pagan symbol. And while it seems like just a silly suggestion, maybe we could all benefit from blowing up a few of these sugar-coated rabbits.
Lately I've been feeling as if I have lost all direction in life. I don't know where I'm going and I'm not really even sure of where I want to go. My priorities are all screwed up. God is not first anymore. School isn't either, apparently, as I've become a straight-B student. It's almost as if nothing is my priority, like nothing really matters anymore. Nothing of importance, at least.
The sad thing is, I don't think I'm alone in this. I think there are far too many people out there with the same problem I have. My problem is probably the epitome of the Peep problem. On the outside, it seems like a sweet deal. I get to "do what I want." But this kind of life shares one disappointingly unfortunate characteristic with Peeps-- it is completely lacking in any substance whatsoever.

Mine is probably the most extreme case, where I am seriously lacking in the effort department. But there are other ways to live your life controlled by a Peep. One such idol, as alluded to before, is the all too infamous school. Honestly, who hasn't idolized school at some point in their life? If you want to get a good job so you can die with lots of money you can't take with you, you have to be educated. These days, being educated means you've gone to college. Graduate school gets you bonus points. To go to college, you first need to get awesome grades in high school and learned how to think like the College Board. If your job is pretty much the rest of your life, why shouldn't you work so hard in school to get that overpaid job?

Quite simply, because retirement is not the end. Death is not the end. There is more.

Every once in a while, I'm nice enough to someone that they ask me why I'm so nice. Most of the time I just shrug it off like it's a rhetorical question. But if you want to know the truth, I'm mostly just scared of the reaction I might get to the answer. The answer? Even before I officially became a Christian, I found it hard to believe that this life is all we have. And so, assuming there is an afterlife, it's not really that hard to see that life is not all about making more money than you know what to do with. It's not about being famous or winning countless trophies. All that is fine and dandy, but ultimately empty.

So in a sense, my reason for being-- or at least trying to be-- a good person are selfish. Part of it is that I want something to show for how I spent my life. But mostly it is because I know that I don't deserve to be in a happy place when this life is over. All my A's and all my awards wouldn't get me into heaven. Even if I pulled off a Ponzi scheme one million times bigger than Madoff's, I couldn't pay my way in. In the end, that is all nothing.

The man who dies with the most toys still dies.


**Disclaimer: I have nothing against Peeps. I just thought it was a very good analogy.