To Every Modern Nero

a call to buried humanity

You’re playing the wrong game.
People are not mines from which you extract value for yourself.
Any good you try to wring from others for your own benefit automatically becomes counterfeit by virtue of the means by which it was procured. It turns to rot as soon as it comes into your possession. It does not fill the void; yet, for one who can only find pleasure in causing terror and harm, the rottenness is addictive. Plus, the numbers look good on paper, which makes you feel like you’re winning, so you double down.

You’re playing the wrong game.
Real power cannot be achieved through violence; real freedom cannot be achieved through oppression. Self-worth cannot be acquired by degrading others. Safety is not grasped by inflicting harm and seizing control.
True safety is Love.
But Love requires self-sacrifice, not self-preservation, and this is why it’s repellent to you; because true sacrifice is not a con you can run to serve yourself. True sacrifice serves the good of the other and the Joy of the whole.

You’re playing the wrong game.
To ensure you are never again the victim, you’ve become the victimizer. This lifestyle of extorting your value from others to bring fulfillment to yourself guarantees emptiness and self-destruction, but somehow that feels safer than facing your own hurt, all your shortcomings, and what you’ve been taught to believe about your inherent value – about what it means to survive, about what it means to succeed. Unfortunately, the game you’re playing has very real prizes; but, instead of being crowned the winner of self-made safety and freedom, your prize is the doom of a self-fulfilling prophecy:

“The thing I have greatly feared has come upon me.”

Trying to escape that constant, internal state of threat ultimately creates an external environment upon which that danger is writ large. It becomes a monster of your own design, and there is no escape. Inevitably you will come to a place bursting with the consequences of your fear-based actions and lifestyle of self-loathing. You thought you were creating an unassailable fortress that could protect you, but its integrity was compromised from the beginning.

It’s too late – you are already vulnerable.
The writing is on the wall. The piper must be paid.

You’re playing the wrong game. But the Truth is for you.
No, you can’t escape consequence.
There will be justice, yes; there will be restitution, yes; there will be pain as a result of the life that you chose, dear God, YES. All of these things are guaranteed, and hallelujah for it. But underneath the beliefs and actions that richly deserve – that only deserve – an eternity in the screaming torment of hell is a soul that God created out of Himself: a creature made for the purpose of loving and being loved forever, a being that is completely worthy of that Love.

How far you have fallen. How monstrous you’ve become. But I know something: the monster is a mask; it’s a forged identity.

There is something deeper and truer about you that cannot be eradicated, no matter how you try. You could come home to it. The pain of punishment could also be the pain of radical transformation if you’d let it.
So, repentance. Please.
Revelation. Please, for the love of God.
Allow yourself to know the goodness that God created you to be; the Love that is the Truth of your calling. Allow them to shatter what you’ve accepted and created. Acknowledge how utterly, how ruinously, misaligned you have been – how much harm your rejection of Love has caused not only to you, but to the people of this world and to the world itself. For the sake of the Truth of the goodness and beauty of your own soul, stop playing God. Please.
For the sake of your humanity, open your eyes.

Please.