By Donald Harold Young
In the summer of 2022, I found myself unemployed. Laid-off twice in my life, both times occurring in my fifties. Like a lot of people (both men and women), my ego and sense of self was directly tied to my job. Working gave me a sense of who I was in the world. Even if that purpose is temporary and transitory.
My Deja-vu lay-off along with list of other losses, made me realize the temporality of my life. A life that was searching for something greater than the passing of time. Both clock and calendar reminded me of my mortality. Unlike time, I have an ending.
As I began to write about my story, I realized not only my deep devotion to the material world but the lies that I believed to sustain my faith in stuff. Lies that sustain the modern world, particularly in the west. Lies that have always deceived us.
Six Lies of the Modern World
You don’t matter; you are random cosmic dust. Our lives matter. Our mere existence, no matter how brief, will change the world. Like a pebble rippling across the surface of space and time, the cosmos is forever changed because of you. We all leave our footprints on life’s beaches, even if time will wash them away. The starry shore eternally changed because your feet were imprinted in the sands of time.
There is nothing unique about you. I am a unique creation of God. I am known through God and my relationships with other creatures in God’s good world, and there is no one like me. There is only one unique you who will ever exist throughout all of human history. There is only one unique you who will ever be conceived among the generations of people who have lived and who have not yet lived. There is only one unique you among the billions of humans who share this planet now and forever.
There is more that divides us than unites us. We are all connected with one another and the cosmos. Our blood is filled with iron, iron that was produced when stars collided with one another and whose remnants fell upon this planet. What we create and bring into the world will forever change the world because everyone is connected to those who helped create the world. We each have inherited this world, and everyone is connected to those who follow us, as we bequeath the world to them. Everyone shares an eternal bond of life that unites past, present, and future generations.
Nothing you do really matters. Our lives are our legacy. Our words and actions might be remembered by people near us and sometimes by people far from us, at least for a short amount of time. Raising children or creating art are tangible examples of legacies forever changing the world, but everything we do changes the world. Everything you do matters.
Every action and inaction has a reaction, no matter how small or trivial it may seem.
Only you can truly know yourself. In truth, you only know yourself in relationship to the world. Who we are—our identities and our egos—is always defined in relationship: to people and animals, to culture and art, to earth and God. Often those who shape our identities are family and friends, or colleagues and mentors. Other times our lives are impacted by well-known or historical figures. Our lives are shaped and affected by the actions or inactions of others. We’re interconnected; no person is an island known only to themselves.
God is dead or doesn’t exist. I owe a debt of gratitude to many people: To people who believe all living things should be honored and respected because they honor our shared Creator. To people who believe we are interconnected with all life; seen and unseen, past and future, known and unknown. To people who believe we sing God’s praise by living a life of genuine kindness, thoughtful humility, and unselfish generosity toward those we know and love, and toward those we don’t know and who may not love us but who nevertheless reflect the image of God. The truth of our true nature is this: God lives in everyone. God unconditionally loves everyone. God is Love.
Learning the untruth of these lies would lead me to the true Truth; Love. This, my spiritual journey, would become the basis for my memoir Finding God in Vegas. The story of a successful pharmaceutical agency executive who seemed to have it all: wealth, status, success. But behind the image was a man deeply unfulfilled, quietly crumbling under the weight of materialism, disillusionment, and spiritual emptiness.
A story of love for the hurting. For the hopeful. For the seekers and the skeptics. 
The love in this book is for you.
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Finding God in Vegas: A Gen X Spiritual Awakening is available in print and digital across all platforms and all book retailers. You can use the link below if Amazon is your preference.
https://www.amazon.com/author/donaldharoldyoung
Don Young is a former pharmaceutical agency executive who left behind worldly success in search of deeper meaning. After a life-changing spiritual awakening, he now shares his journey of faith, healing, and transformation through his website, donaldharoldyoung.com and on Substack, where he posts daily devotions and weekly reflections about faith and culture.
