The Empty Pursuit of Popularity
I would come home from parties having lied to girls so I could have sex with them and I’d go to my bed and I’d cry because I didn’t understand why I was doing these things. I guess what mattered most to me was being somebody that everybody would want to be friends with.
Popularity can take you places, but maybe not where you expected.
So I invested all of my time in being cool person, doing the kinds of things that cool people had to do, smoke whatever I had to smoke, drink whatever I had to drink, smash whatever I had to smash, so that people would say, “Aaron, you the man”.
When the Wheels Fall Off
Well I was riding along this high paced trail of popularity when the wheels fell of the lie I was riding upon. I realised that although I had all these friends and all this popularity, it wasn’t real, and while I was pouring all my energies into this life on the outside, and how I looked, and who I thought I saw when I looked in the mirror, it was the inner man on the inside where I realised that I had a lot of questions with no answers! Despite all of the laughs and the “life of the party Aaron”, on the inside I was sad.
Soon after I arrived at University, my life in a mess, I started going down the same track that I had come from. I started finding popularity with a new group of people. In the midst of all this I went to a talk and somebody explained to me what it meant to know Jesus and perhaps for the first time I sat down and listened. I probably would have told people that I knew all kinds of things about Jesus, but the truth was I didn’t know much at all. I think the biggest question we need to answer is: “Who is this guy Jesus, and what if he is the real deal?”
A New Path with Jesus
I think the biggest shame is trying to live a life devoid of trying to think about that or answer that question, to go on to discover that he was real and that this mattered a lot. If he really gave his life for us, that we might find life, I think that’s worth some of our time.
My challenge to you is to look into it. Don’t throw away something that you don’t understand.
I am on a different side of the equation now, and I can say – yeah, having lived this life with Christ in it, it’s totally different. It’s a life in full colour. There are a lot of challenges, but I can sincerely say that my faith in Christ is real and he is transforming me every day.
Written by Aaron Thomson