Unhappiness and slavery

I have been thinking this week about how we get enslaved to the things in this world and how this results in unhappiness. When we or I seek happiness in the wrong things it really brings emptiness. Two books I have been reading stated something along this line which I have found helpful and want to think about some more.


I am reading several books and I like these thoughts--This one by Beth Moore is good:

"We fear making sacrifices. But the irony is that we make a lot of sacrifices when we are not living the will of God. How many things have we placed on the altar to Satan's kingdom? We live sacrificially when we're outside the will of God , giving up all sorts of things that were meant to be ours in Christ. We want to claim those things back, but in the process we're going to be putting a few other things on the altar."

Then this quote by Thomas Merton, a Catholic priest, from his autobiography , The Seven Storey Mountain:

I had at last become a true child of the modern world, completely tangled up in petty and useless concerns with myself, and almost incapable of even considering or understanding anything that was really important to my own true interests.......I had left Oakham and walked out into the world that I thought I was going to ransack and rob of all its pleasures and satisfactions. I had done what I intended, and now I found that it was I who was emptied and robbed and gutted. What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear.