What is Your Obsession? - Part 3

I read this post today at Holy Experience and it connected with my heart due to my own musings about my own personal obsessions that you can read in part 1 and part 2. Please check it out if you have time. If not, in addition to her own struggles with making her accomplishments idols in her life she shares this short story:

While other monks lived close enough to cities to sell their handiwork in the markets, Abba Paul lived such a distance that the cost of transportation would exceed any profits from selling the baskets. Nonetheless, each day he collected palm fronds and worked as faithfully as if basket making were his primary means of support.

And come the end of the year, when his cave overflowed with long months of toil, he took torch to the work of his hands and the flames devoured and rose higher and cackled long into the night. Then, come morning, the heat died away, satiated.

And Abba Paul stood in the long quiet and the wind blew away the ashes of all his work.

Can I live to not prove myself by my hard work? Can I do what I do NOT for the accolades of man? Can I give of myself with no expectation in return, no recognition, no admiration?

Thoughts to ponder.....lessons to learn.....

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. ~ 2 Cor. 4:18