By He Kai
In recent years, climbing high towers or buildings to take selfies without taking any safety measures has become a new popular way for the young people to seek thrills and excitement. These fearless adventurers challenge their limits time after time, and have drawn lots of people’s attention and enjoyed a cult following among countless fans. However, at the same time when they gain others’ attention and admiration, some of them also pay a heavy price for that.
There is a Russian who used to be famous for rooftopping. The number of his fans on the platform reached more than 10000. However, it was regretted that in 2015, when snapping selfies on the rooftop, he fell down accidentally and left this world forever.
On March 15, 2016, a seventeen-year-old Russian girl, climbed on a 28-feet-high railway bridge to take selfies. Suddenly, she fell off the bridge. In hopelessness of the fall, she tried to grab several iron chains, but these iron chains were the power lines of electric trains, leading to her being electrocuted.
In October of 2016, in order to get selfies against magnificent views on rooftops, a 12-year-old Russian girl climbed to the top of a seventeen-story building. After photographing, she stood on the edges and shared the pictures with her friends on her phone. Unexpectedly, without being stable, she fell off the roof …
Two lovers went to the second vertex of Northcliff, Johannesburg. When the 21-year-old girl was standing on the rock, at the top of the cliff, her boyfriend was turning a camera on her. However, the rock suddenly rolled, and the girl rolled down the cliff.
For another example, a British man who was a famous extreme sports athlete, went to take selfies on a 90-metre-high cliff on the beach in the south of Sydney. Two days later, he was found to have dashed to death on the beach, not far away from the cliff.
With regard to more and more accidents resulting from rooftopping, a doctor of Carnegie Mellon University in America, Hemank Lamba, did a study together with his several friends. And the study found the number of the people who died from rooftopping every year worldwide was increasing. In 2014, the victims who died from rooftopping totaled 15; in 2015, 39; and only in the first eight months in 2016, 73. The findings also showed that the great reason leading to their death was dropping from height. These victims usually liked to climb to the clifftops or to the rooftops to take selfies. They averaged 21 years of age, and 76% of them were male.
In order to court excitement and create surprising actions to gain more fans’ praises, these rooftopping enthusiasts even don’t care for their lives. When the news that some people died from rooftopping was announced, it doesn’t awake those rooftoppers. On the contrary, this phenomenon is getting even more intense, and a growing number of people strive to follow. It really makes us puzzled. Why are they so fascinated by and enthusiastic about rooftopping?
God’s words say, “You cannot see these trends with the naked eye. When the wind of a trend blows through, perhaps only a small number of people will become the trendsetters. They start off doing this kind of thing, accepting this kind of idea or this kind of perspective. The majority of people, however, in the midst of their unawareness, will still be continually infected, assimilated and attracted by this kind of trend, until they all unknowingly and involuntarily accept it, and are all submerged in and controlled by it. For man who is not of sound body and mind, who never knows what is truth, who cannot tell the difference between positive and negative things, these kinds of trends one after another make them all willingly accept these trends, the life view, the life philosophies and values that come from Satan. They accept what Satan tells them on how to approach life and the way to live that Satan ‘bestows’ on them. They have not the strength, neither do they have the ability, much less the awareness to resist” “Human beings, dominated by their satanic disposition, harbor a sort of desire, a type of ambition, inside of them. This is hidden within their humanity. They never want to stay on the ground; they keep wanting to go up into the air. Is being in the air a place for a person to stay? Whose place is it to stay? (Satan’s.) That is a place for Satan, not a place for humans. …If people keep having such ambitions, always wanting to turn themselves extraordinary and superior, different from others, and special, then that is a problem! First of all, the source of your thinking is wrong. ‘Extraordinary and superior’—what kind of thinking is this? ‘Stand head and shoulders above the rest,’ ‘defy all comparison,’ ‘flawless and impeccable,’ ‘fine beyond compare,’ ‘forging a unique path’—when used in the goals of people’s pursuits, are these phrases good or bad? ‘Outstanding,’ ‘excellent,’ ‘special talent,’ ‘powerful presence,’ ‘charming personality,’ ‘irresistible,’ ‘celebrated and great,’ ‘idolized’—are these goals that people should be pursuing in conducting themselves?” God’s words speak very clearly. It turns out that rooftopping is another evil trend arisen by Satan, and behind that, Satan controls these all. Using our human ignorance, and not having the truth and ability of discerning between right and wrong, good and bad, it instills things that shouldn’t be possessed by normal humanity in us to make us seek excitement, pursue to be a great man, a superman, a hero, an irresistible man and so on to satisfy our vanity of seeking reputation.
Those rooftoppers harbor a sort of desire and ambition, they always attempt to challenge the limits and take rooftopping to terrifying heights by climbing to the clifftops and rooftops of high buildings, in order to show they are extraordinary and unusual. Besides, they also want to attract numerous adorers’ admiration and gain their praises to satisfy their vanity and have a sense of achievement. Dominated by such a desire and ambition of a rapid rise to fame, they forget they are ordinary people of flesh and blood. Some of them just blindly and overconfidently risked climbing to high places to take an epic selfie, which even cost the lives of them. From this, we can see Satan’s sinister motives. It lures and corrupts man, and “brings” man to the air to adventure so as to achieve its purpose of harming and devouring man. Meanwhile, we can see our pitifulness and sadness, for every time Satan arises some thoughts or trends, they can attract and corrupt us humans, and make a part of or more people die for that. However, we don’t have the ability to resist them at all but passively become playthings and victims of Satan.
Then, how can such a situation be turned around? What kind of pursuit and living should a normal man have? These are the questions that all today’s young people and those who have ambitions and pursuits should figure out clearly. God’s words say, “When creating humans, God put them on the ground so that your daily lives could be completely normal and your lifestyles disciplined, and so that you could learn general knowledge about how to be human beings, and learn how to behave, how to live, and how to worship God. God did not give you wings; He did not allow you to stay up in the air.” “It should be one that wants to walk one step at a time on the ground in following God and worshiping God, and wants to be a creature of creation. It does not desire to be a bird in the sky or any object of creation on another planet, let alone wish to be someone with supernatural abilities” We inherently are the creatures. When creating humans, God didn’t give us supernatural capability, but we always want to be a superman, a great man, or an idol in others’ hearts. In fact, what we should do is conscientiously to be a creation, to be able to obey God’s predestination and arrangement, and to comply with the life course and living environment that God prepared for us to properly be a man on the ground; also, we should stand in the place of a created being, be a man who worships God, and be a manifestation of God’s glory. These are the pursuits we should have and the value and meaning of our life.
