I like the scene in the Disney-Pixar movie Wall.e where Wall.e picks up a velvet ring box with a diamond ring in it, throws away the ring, but keeps the box. It's a good illustration of how the value of things are relative. It's like a billion dollars sounds like a huge amount of money, but I have a 100 billion dollar bill in Zimbabwe money. It has expired, but even when it was current, that bill was only worth about 45 cents in American money. Even in Zimbabwe, it may not have been enough to buy a loaf of bread. When I was a kid, I bought comic books for 10, 12, or 15 cents. I liked to keep them, but after I got a pile, my mother would always make me throw them out. Now many of them sell for hundreds of dollars to collectors. Not many years ago when the price of gold hit $500 dollars an ounce, people thought it was crazy, now it's selling for over $1600 an ounce (I personally think the bubble is going to burst on that one soon). But how much value do you think a starving child would put on a gold coin? Not much, unless he realized he could buy food with it.

    The point of all this is that the value of things, especially man-made things is always relative and subject to change with time, location, and even as we change. You might complain about paying $100 for a drug to treat a minor illness, but not for one that saves your life. So spending your life working yourself into an early grave in order to get lots of things, lots of cars, real estate, stocks and bonds, etc. really doesn't do much good. I know people who over the past twenty years or so bought ten or more houses in this area as investments. Most of them are now worth half what they paid for them. Stocks can loose value also (I once wanted to invest in Virginia's own Circuit City, thank God I didn't).

    There are some things that never loose value. The most important of those is, of course, our immortal soul. Although I probably shouldn't refer to it as “our” soul as if we own it and can do with it as we please. It is better, and far more accurate, to think of the soul as something that has been loaned to us. It is ours only if we treat it right, care for it, nourish it, and listen to it. Otherwise, when we die, that soul will go to heaven, but it will leave us behind. Souls always return to heaven, but most of the time they don't take the human they were attached to with them. So if you want to go to heaven with that soul, you must awaken it and become one with it, now, while you are still alive.