SHE SOLD HER SOUL FOR LABUBU DOLLS: How Can We Think So Little of Something So Valuable?
(Scroll down for the sermon transcript.)
A marketing specialist posts a joke about buying souls, and before you know it, someone actually shows up ready to sign the agreement in blood because she needs money for dolls and concert tickets.
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
The Transaction That Shocked a Nation
You’re scrolling through Telegram when you see an advertisement from a man named Dmitri. He wants to buy someone’s soul for 100,000 rubles, about $1,180 American dollars. The catch? You have to sign the contract in your own blood. Most people would laugh and keep scrolling, treating it like any other internet joke.
Karina didn’t laugh. The 26-year-old woman from Moscow saw the offer and thought about those Labubu dolls she’d been wanting. Those furry creatures with sharp teeth and rabbit ears that celebrities carry around. She needed money for the dolls and a concert ticket. So she contacted Dmitri, pricked her finger, and signed her name in blood on an actual contract.
The Russian Orthodox Church didn’t find it funny at all. They issued an official statement declaring that Karina had chosen the side of evil and that Dmitri had become Satan himself by purchasing her soul. They predicted illness, suffering, and spiritual death for both participants. Their warnings carried the weight of centuries of theological tradition about the eternal value of the human soul.
The Object of Her Obsession
These weren’t just any toys Karina wanted. Labubu dolls started as characters in a Hong Kong artist’s picture book, then became physical collectibles in 2019. After Lisa from Blackpink was photographed with one, the dolls exploded into a global phenomenon around 2023. Celebrities like Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and Dua Lipa started carrying them. One rare Labubu sold at auction for $282,000. (Yeah, I know.)
The dolls come in blind boxes; you don’t know which one you’re getting until you open it. This triggers the same dopamine rush as gambling. The company deliberately makes certain designs rare to drive up demand. Some countries have actually banned them. Iraq seized over 4,000 dolls, claiming they could attract demonic spirits. Conspiracy theorists link them to ancient Mesopotamian demons because of their sharp-toothed grins. (Which is ridiculous, my cat also has sharp teeth and she’s not demonic. Oh wait… bad example.)
When reporters asked Karina about her purchase afterward, she expressed zero concern about what Dmitri might do with her soul. She got her dolls. She saw her concert. Mission accomplished.
What This Says About Humanity’s Spiritual Bankruptcy
The most disturbing part of this story isn’t the blood or the contract or even the dolls. It’s that Karina valued her eternal soul at $1,180. Not a million dollars. Not a billion. Not all the wealth in the world. Just enough money for some toys and a concert ticket.
This story I’ve told – which is 100% real, it was reported just last month, September 2025 – reveals something despairingly broken about humanity’s spiritual condition. We live in a generation that has completely lost sight of eternal value. Our culture has become so materialistic, so focused on immediate gratification, that the concept of a soul seems less real than a limited-edition collectible.
Think about the implications. If someone walked up to you on the street and offered to buy your house for ten dollars, you’d laugh at them. If they offered to buy your car for a buck and a pack of smokes, you’d think they were insane – even if you do still smoke despite the warning label. But offer to buy something infinitely more valuable than all the houses and cars in the world that have ever and will ever exist, and Karina didn’t even negotiate. She just took the first offer.
Psalm 49:8 says no payment is enough to redeem a soul, that the ransom for a life can never be sufficient enough. No amount of money or possessions or feelings or whatever is enough to cover the cost of one person’s soul. Ancient wisdom understood what modern humanity has forgotten: souls are priceless. Yet here we have a 26-year-old woman treating hers like a coupon she found in her pocket.
The Death of Sacred Understanding
Your ancestors, even if they weren’t particularly religious, had an innate sense that some things were sacred. They understood that certain boundaries shouldn’t be crossed, certain things shouldn’t be sold, certain jokes shouldn’t be made. They lived with what sociologists call “a sacred canopy” over their lives, an invisible but real awareness of the divine.
That canopy has been shredded. We now live in what Charles Taylor calls “a disenchanted world,” where nothing feels sacred anymore. Everything gets reduced to its market value. Mystery gets explained away. Reverence gets mocked as superstition. The soul becomes just another asset to leverage.
Dmitri posted his offer as a social experiment, he said. A joke. He wanted to see if someone would actually do it – sell their soul. The fact that he thought buying someone’s soul would be funny tells you everything about our culture’s spiritual temperature. Previous generations would have been horrified at the very suggestion. Our society turns it into content for social media.
When nothing is sacred, everything is for sale. When you lose the ability to recognize the holy, you lose the ability to value anything properly. Karina’s generation – Gen Z (although we see this in Millennials, Gen X, and… well every age in pockets of people everywhere) has been raised in a world where transcendence is treated as fantasy, where the spiritual is dismissed as psychological, where the eternal is sacrificed for the immediate. (We need to be praying for Generation Alpha – and the future Generation Beta, or whatever they end up being called.)
The Truth About Soul Ownership
Here’s where theology gets fascinating and humanity’s cheapening of the soul becomes even more tragic. You cannot sell your soul to the Devil or anyone else for one simple reason: you don’t own it in the first place. Let me repeat that… you cannot sell your soul, because you don’t own it to begin with.
First Corinthians 6:19-20 makes this crystal clear. You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Jesus Christ paid for your soul with His blood on the cross. The transaction was completed about 2,000 years before Karina was even born. Every human soul already has a price tag attached, and that price was the blood of the Son of God.
Think about it this way. If you tried to sell your neighbor’s car, the buyer wouldn’t actually own the vehicle just because you took their money. The real owner could show up with the title and reclaim their property. The buyer got scammed, and you committed fraud. That’s essentially what Karina just attempted to do (and what Dimitri was party of); selling something that wasn’t hers to sell. Buying something that isn’t available for purchase.
The fact that both Karina and Dimitri didn’t know or care about this divine ownership reveals how far humanity has drifted from spiritual reality. We have become so disconnected from God that we don’t even recognize His claim on us. We live like orphans when we’re actually children of the King.
The Symptom of a Deeper Disease
Karina’s willingness to sell her soul for designer dolls is just a symptom of humanity’s spiritual disease. Every day, millions of people make the same trade in slower, less dramatic (or less ridiculously idiotic or blatantly obvious) ways. They don’t sign contracts in blood, but they gradually exchange the eternal for the temporary.
The businessman who destroys his family and morals for career success has valued his soul at the price of a corner office. The teenager who abandons their faith to fit in has sold out for social acceptance. The person who compromises their integrity for financial gain or fame has put a price tag on what God says is priceless.
Jesus asked in Matthew 16:26 what profit a person gains if they win the whole world but lose their soul. This question assumes people understand that souls matter more than worldly success. Which was obvious “way back when” – but what happens when an entire society no longer believes souls exist, or if they do – that they matter? What happens when the eternal becomes less real than the material?
You get a 26-year-old woman signing away her soul for toys without a second thought. You get a marketing specialist treating divine things as content for viral posts. You get a society that has lost the ability to recognize what truly matters.
The Lost Art of Valuing the Eternal
Your great-grandparents might not have been saints, but they understood that some things transcended the material world. They sensed eternity in their hearts, as Ecclesiastes 3:11 describes. They knew that humans were more than just clever animals, that life was more than just consumption, that death wasn’t the end of the story.
This understanding shaped how they lived. They made sacrifices for future generations. They built cathedrals that took centuries to complete. They created art that pointed beyond itself to something greater. They lived with the weight of eternity on their shoulders, and it gave their lives meaning and direction.
Even Murderers Knew Better
Even murderers of the past, despite their decision to commit the crimes, knew what they were taking was not just a life of no value or consequence.
Jeffrey Dahmer explicitly stated while in prison that he knew his victims had souls and were precious to God. He said he wished he could bring them back and that he prayed for forgiveness from God and the families. He acknowledged each victim was someone’s son, brother, or friend with infinite value. This known and admitted monster knew about the reality of God and the eternal soul.
The Son of Sam killer, David Berkowitz wrote extensively in prison about the value of his victims’ lives. He stated that he knew he had destroyed precious souls and that each person he killed was made in God’s image. He’s still alive – and he still refuses to attend parole hearings because he believes he took something irreplaceable – human souls that had eternal value.
Before her execution, Karla Fay Tucker (who killed two people with a pickaxe during a burglary) spoke about understanding that her victims had souls that went into eternity and that she had stolen not just their earthly lives but all their future moments with loved ones. She acknowledged she had destroyed something sacred and valuable beyond measure.
In his final interviews before execution, Ted Bundy admitted he knew his victims were valuable human beings with souls. He spoke about how he actually had to suppress that knowledge to commit his crimes, describing it as fighting against his conscience that was screaming at him these were precious lives he was about to snuff out.
These examples show that even those who committed the ultimate crime against human life recognized that souls have value. This makes Karina’s casual indifference about her own soul even more striking. Even murderers understood the weight of a soul, but she couldn’t see the value of her own.
The Generation That Can’t See Past Tomorrow
Karina’s outlook on eternity can barely think past the next social media post. The average attention span of newer generations has shrunk not to hours or minutes, but to seconds. Planning extends to maybe the next weekend. The idea of eternal consequences seems as remote as ancient mythology about gods that never existed.
When you lose the eternal perspective, everything becomes cheap. Human life becomes disposable. Relationships become transactional. Love becomes temporary. Truth becomes relative. And souls, those immortal parts of humanity that will outlast the stars, become less valuable than designer dolls and tickets that’ll be ripped in half and be worthless three hours after you walk in the door and hand them to the gate attendant.
The Culture That Creates Karinas
Karina didn’t develop her low view of her soul in a vacuum – it’s not entirely on her shoulders that she ended up with her attitudes about all things eternal. She grew up in a culture that taught her to value the wrong things. From childhood, she was bombarded with messages that her worth came from what she owned, what she looked like, who followed her online.
Schools taught her she was just a highly evolved animal, the product of random chance and natural selection, not that she was created in the image of God. Entertainment taught her that happiness comes from consumption and impulse. Social media taught her that image mattered more than character, even if that image is built on a lie. Hollywood taught her that her body was only good for giving way in meaningless sexual experiences, because it’s just a meat suit anyway. Is it any wonder she couldn’t recognize the value of her own soul?
The Church’s Shared Responsibility
The Church bears some responsibility on this too – we don’t get to dodge the bullet completely. Many churches have become so focused on being relevant that they’ve forgotten to teach about eternity. They offer self-help with a spiritual veneer instead of proclaiming the weight of glory and the reality of judgment and the spiritual fatality of sin. They’ve made Christianity comfortable when it should be transformative. Becoming a Christian doesn’t mean you’ll be happy, have no problems, or forget about your sordid and ugly past – life still happens – but we have forgiveness for the sins we’ve committed, we’re assured God will be with us no matter what trials we go through, and more important than anything, we know our soul is safe and secure – that whenever we do leave this mortal coil, be it eighty years from now or eighty seconds from now – that we’ll live in eternity in a way more miraculous than we can imagine.
When pastors talk more about success than sanctification, more about happiness than holiness, more about your best life NOW than eternal life FOREVER, they produce people who think like Karina and Dimitri. People who see no difference between temporal and eternal value. People who would trade forever for right now without hesitation, because we have to “live in the moment.”
The Biblical Mirror
The prophet Isaiah warned about this spiritual blindness thousands of years ago. In Isaiah 55:2, God asks why you spend money on what isn’t bread and your labor on what doesn’t satisfy. He’s describing exactly what Karina did, exactly what our society does every day.
We chase after emptiness. We exhaust ourselves for nothing. We trade the permanent for the passing. And the saddest part? We don’t even realize we’re making a bad trade. We’ve become so spiritually malnourished that junk food seems like a feast.
Romans 1:21-22 explains how this happens. When people reject the knowledge of God, their thinking becomes futile and their hearts become darkened. Although they claim to be wise, they become fools. They exchange the glory of the immortal God for images of created things.
Modern humanity has done exactly this, just with different idols.
Instead of golden calves, we have golden phones. Instead of temple prostitutes, we have OnlyFans. Instead of child sacrifice to Molech, we have abortion for convenience. The idols have been updated, but the spiritual bankruptcy remains the same.
The Infinite Worth of What’s Being Wasted
To understand how tragic Karina’s transaction truly is, you need to grasp what a soul actually is. Genesis 2:7 says God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. You carry within you the very breath of the Almighty. You’re not just matter in motion; you’re not just a clump of cells that became a larger clump of matter… you are matter animated by divinity. So your matter matters, if you understand such matters. And that matters.
Your soul is the part of you that thinks, feels, chooses, loves, hopes, dreams. It’s what makes you human rather than just another animal – regardless of what your high school Biology teacher or college professor told you. Being human, as opposed to being an animal is what allows you to appreciate beauty, create art, experience transcendence, know God. It’s the part of you that will exist when the universe itself has passed away. Your body might be made up of a lot of the same ingredients as an animal, but that doesn’t make you one.
More Than the Sum of Your Parts
Your kindergartener’s Play-Doh “cookies” and your grandmother’s Christmas cookies might contain similar ingredients – flour, water, salt. But you’re only eating one of them (hopefully). Same basic materials, vastly different results. One is a treasure you pretend to eat, the other is a treasure you actually eat.
Okay, we’re not cookies… so let’s get a bit more biological…
You and the tree in your backyard are made of the same basic elements – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. About 99% of your body consists of just six elements, and plants have those same six elements. Chemically speaking, you’re not that different from a fern. But the fern can’t write poetry about being a fern. It can’t wonder why it exists. It can’t choose to sacrifice itself for another fern it loves. Same ingredients, but only you have the breath of God animating those chemicals into consciousness.
You share about 60% of your DNA with a banana. More than half your genetic code matches that yellow fruit in your kitchen. Chemically, molecularly, you’re more banana than not-banana. But last time anyone checked, bananas don’t have existential crises. They don’t compose symphonies. They don’t stay up at night wondering if they’ve been good enough bananas. The difference between you and that banana isn’t in the chemicals – it’s in the soul that makes those chemicals capable of contemplating their own existence.
A jellyfish is 95% water. You’re about 60% water. A watermelon is 92% water. Chemically, all three of us are just organized water with some other stuff mixed in. But you use your water-based brain to solve calculus problems, write love letters, and invent smartphones. The jellyfish just floats. The watermelon just… sits there. Same H₂O, vastly different results. The difference? Only you have that divine spark that turns water and minerals into worship, wonder, and the ability to make watermelon jokes. (Although I will admit it takes a divine spark to make that watermelon so delicious. And the banana.)
What Separates You From Every Other Creature
Consider what separates you from every other creature on Earth. A dog might feel happy, but it doesn’t contemplate the nature of happiness. A bird builds a nest from instinct, but it doesn’t dream of architecture that’s never existed before. A chimpanzee might use a stick as a tool, but it doesn’t envision machines that could fly to the moon. (Fun Fact: Planet of the Apes was not a documentary.)
Only humans ask “Why do I exist?” Only humans grapple with meaning, purpose, destiny. Your dog doesn’t have an existential crisis. Your goldfish doesn’t wonder about its place in the universe. Elephants, despite their remarkable memory, don’t write memoirs about their lived experiences. (But then again, what do elephants really NEED to remember in the first place?)
This self-awareness, this consciousness of consciousness itself, flows from your immortal soul. You don’t just exist; you know you exist. You don’t just think; you think about thinking. You can step outside yourself and examine your own thoughts, judge your own actions, imagine yourself in different circumstances. No animal does this or can do this. They live entirely in the present moment, driven by instinct and conditioning.
The Divine Spark of Creativity
Your soul gives you the ability to create things that have never existed before. Animals might modify their environment or behavior, but they don’t compose symphonies that move people to tears. Beavers build dams, but they don’t design cathedrals that point human hearts toward heaven. Spiders weave intricate webs, but they don’t write novels that explore the depths of human experience or try to save cartoon pigs by writing silk messages. The beaver’s dam from a thousand years ago looks identical to one built yesterday. But human creativity explodes in infinite directions, never exhausting its possibilities.
Think about invention. Animals use what exists, but humans imagine what could be – what might exist. You look at a rock and see a sculpture waiting to be freed from it. You hear the wind and imagine music. You see birds flying and dream of doing so yourself, and thus we invented airplanes and other flying machines. You observe sickness and envision medicine. This ability to see beyond what is, to what might be, comes from that divine spark within you.
The Burden and Gift of Abstract Understanding
Your soul enables you to grasp abstract concepts that no animal can comprehend. Justice. Mercy. Honor. Beauty. Truth. A lion doesn’t feel guilty about killing a gazelle. A shark doesn’t wrestle with the morality of eating a few guys on a boat trying to track it down while singing a drinking song. But you have a conscience that transcends survival instinct. You can choose to starve rather than steal, to die rather than betray, to sacrifice everything for a principle.
Language itself reveals your soul’s unique nature. Animals communicate, they might even have their own rudimentary version of conversations… but they don’t have conversations about conversations. They signal danger or food or mating availability, but they don’t tell stories or debate ideas. We use words not just to convey information but to paint pictures in other minds, to preserve thoughts across generations, to reach toward the ineffable and eternal.
Your immortal soul gives you the capacity to love beyond biological imperative. Animals care for their young until they’re self-sufficient. They might form pack bonds for survival. But only humans love the unlovable, sacrifice for strangers, cherish memories of the dead, write epitaphs, compose love songs, die for love – something that has no evolutionary advantage.
Transcending Time and Space
The soul enables you to transcend time in ways no animal can. You carry the past with you not just as conditioning but as story, as meaning, as identity. You anticipate the future not just as instinct but as hope, plan, vision, dream. You can imagine your own death and what lies beyond it. You can conceive of eternity and feel its pull on your heart.
Mathematics and science flow from the soul’s ability to recognize patterns not just in the physical world but in abstract reality. No ape will ever ponder prime numbers. No crow, despite its problem-solving abilities, will ever write equations that describe the universe. No dolphin, as intelligent as we’ve discovered they are, will ever contemplate quantum mechanics, or let us know that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is the number 42. Only the human soul can discover and decode the invisible laws that govern visible reality.
The Weight of Moral Responsibility
Your soul gives you the burden and gift of moral responsibility. A tornado that destroys a town isn’t evil; it’s just following natural laws. A lion that kills cubs isn’t cruel; it’s following instinct. But you know good from evil, right from wrong, better from worse. You can choose against your nature, against your own interests, against your own desires, because your soul recognizes there is a higher law than simple survival or pleasure.
Art in all its forms springs from the soul’s need to express what cannot be reduced to mere words or survival needs. Why do you paint? Not for warmth or shelter or food. Why do you dance? Not to get somewhere faster. Why do you make music? Not to scare away predators – although that is a natural byproduct if you’re just starting lessons on a violin. (Just ask any parent who’s survived their child’s first year of orchestra.) You create because something in you must express itself, must reach for beauty, must capture truth, must communicate soul to soul.
The Universal Impulse to Worship
The soul enables worship. Animals don’t build altars. They don’t pray. They don’t seek meaning beyond the material. But from humanity’s earliest records, you find evidence of worship, of reaching toward the divine, of recognizing something greater than ourselves. This universal human impulse doesn’t come from evolution or environment; it comes from the soul that recognizes its Source.
Consider humor, that distinctly human trait. Animals play, but they don’t tell jokes. They don’t understand irony, satire, puns. But you do – otherwise you wouldn’t still be listening to me (or I’m not entertaining to listen to – but I digress). Laughter at absurdity, the ability to find joy in the unexpected, to create and appreciate comedy; this too flows from the soul that can step outside immediate experience and see it from another angle.
The Terrible Freedom of Choice
Scientists can explain how your brain fires neurons, but they can’t explain why you have consciousness. They can map your DNA, but they can’t capture your personhood. They can measure your body, but they can’t weigh your soul. Because your soul exists in a category beyond scientific measurement, beyond material valuation, beyond earthly comparison.
I know I’ve gone off on a tangent here but I’ve done so because it’s an important point that both Karina and Dimitri either never learned or forgot. Your soul gives you the terrible freedom to choose your own destruction… and your own damnation. Animals can’t be self-destructive in the way humans can. They don’t commit suicide from dealing with anxiety or depression. They don’t destroy themselves with substances to escape mental anguish. They don’t sacrifice their well-being for abstract ideas. This dark capacity also proves the soul’s reality; only a being with eternal dimensions can choose against its own existence. Only a being with a soul can choose to put that soul in jeopardy.
This is what Karina treated as worth less than toys that will be forgotten in five years. This is what humanity increasingly sees as either non-existent or negligible. The very thing that makes us capable of science and art, love and sacrifice, creativity and worship… the very thing that makes us human… gets traded for mass-produced collectibles if you forget what you are truly worth… that you are priceless… and that’s God’s opinion, not mine (although I do agree with Him).
Living From Your Soul
Every time you have an original thought, you’re experiencing your soul. Every time you choose right over easy, you’re exercising your soul. Every time you create something new, love someone deeply, or wonder about your purpose, you’re living from that immortal part of you that bears God’s image.
But the flip side is true, just as Dimitri and Karina will undoubtedly find out someday unless they make a radical change spiritually… you can choose easy and quick, over what is right and correct. You can choose to misuse or abuse something rather than creating your own thing, you can choose to use someone for their body or what they can give you rather than choosing to love that person deeply in a self-sacrificing way. You can choose to ignore the immortal part of you and live instead an immoral life.
This is the part of you that will exist when the stars burn out, when the universe itself passes away. The part that can know God, commune with Him, reflect His nature, share His eternity. And this, this infinite, irreplaceable, God-breathed soul, is what Karina valued at $1,180.
When you understand this, the tragedy becomes almost unbearable. It’s not just that she sold her soul cheaply; it’s that she sold the very thing that made her capable of making the sale in the first place. The consciousness that could conceive of the transaction, the will that could choose it, the creativity that could desire those dolls, all of it springs from the very soul she treated as disposable.
When Sacred Becomes a Punchline
The fact that Dmitri thought buying a soul would be funny reveals how far humanity has fallen from where we used to be. Sacred things have become punchlines. Spiritual matters have become social experiments. The eternal has become entertainment.
Previous generations understood that some things shouldn’t be mocked – ever. They had a healthy fear of the divine, even if they weren’t particularly religious. They sensed that certain boundaries shouldn’t be crossed, certain words shouldn’t be spoken, certain things shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Nowadays, nothing is off the table when it comes to creating (or trying to create) comedy. Rape, murder, child sacrifice, you name it, there’s a so-called comedian on a stage in a bar somewhere tonight making jokes about it – and even worse, the audience is laughing.
Today’s younger generation has lost that reverent fear. Even when it comes to things that are supposedly spiritual and good… everything becomes potential content. Everything becomes an opportunity for humor or clicks. People film themselves in churches for TikTok views. They use prayer as a meme. They treat baptism as a photo opportunity. I’m not saying any of these items out of context is wrong – but motivation matters. WHY are you filming yourself in church for TikTok? Is it for views, for cred, for subscribers… or do you really have something important to say that has eternal value? Are you posting that Christian meme for laughs, or to get a valid point across to someone who truly needs to hear it? Are you taking that photo of your baptism for your own memories, as a reminder of the important decision you made, to share your faith with others and how important it is to you… or just because you know your church friends will click the LIKE button and maybe share it so you can build your following?
The sacred has been so thoroughly desacralized that it no longer even registers as different from the profane.
The Lost Beginning of Wisdom
Proverbs 9:10 says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. When a culture loses that fear, it loses its wisdom. When people no longer recognize the holy, they lose the ability to properly value anything. Everything becomes equally meaningless, equally disposable, equally cheap.
The most heartbreaking aspect of humanity’s low view of the soul is that it makes redemption seem unnecessary. If your soul has no value, why would it need saving in the first place? If you’re just a collection of atoms that will return to dust, what’s there to redeem?
This is Satan’s masterstroke. He doesn’t need to buy souls if he can convince people souls don’t matter. He doesn’t need to steal what people freely throw away. He doesn’t need to fight for what humanity voluntarily surrenders to him.
The Cross: God’s Statement of Your Soul’s Value
But here’s the truth that cuts through the deception: God valued your soul so highly that He sent His only Son to die for it. John 3:16 doesn’t say God sort of liked the world. It says He loved it. Not the world as in the earth – but the world, as in all humanity (and this includes you). He loved all of us (past, present, and future) enough to pay the ultimate price for souls that humanity treats as worthless.
The cross stands as the ultimate statement of your soul’s value. Every drop of blood Jesus shed declares that even though your matter isn’t eternal, you do matter eternally. Every strip of flesh torn from his back with that whip, exposing muscle and bone, was done on your behalf, to proclaim your infinite worth. Every spike smashed through the bones, muscle, and tendons of his wrists and feet, shouts that your soul is precious beyond calculation.
The Alarm Bell We Can’t Ignore
Karina’s story should serve as an alarm bell for all of us. When a young woman can casually sell her soul for toys and feel nothing, when a man can buy it as a joke and celebrate, when society can watch and just shake their heads with amusement, making light of the story – something is desperately wrong.
You’re witnessing the logical endpoint of materialism. You’re seeing what happens when cultures abandon the transcendent. You’re watching humanity sell its birthright for bowls of soup, trade its inheritance for trinkets, exchange its glory for garbage.
The prophet Joel called for people to rend their hearts and return to the Lord. That message feels more urgent now than ever. Humanity needs to rediscover the weight of eternity, the reality of the soul, the seriousness of spiritual things – before everyone becomes like Karina, unable to recognize the value of what they’re throwing away.
Living Counter to the Culture
If you are a follower of Christ, you’re called to live differently. You’re called to value what God values, treasure what He treasures, protect what He died in such a horrible and painful way, to redeem. In a world that treats souls as cheap, you must treat them as precious… as priceless.
This means refusing to laugh at spiritual things even when everyone else does. It means taking eternity seriously even when it makes you seem strange. It means valuing your soul and the souls of others more than any earthly possession or achievement.
It means telling others about how much Jesus loves them and what he paid for their souls – despite being the host of a paranormal and true crime podcast.
When your coworkers trade their integrity for promotions, you hold firm. When your friends compromise their values for acceptance, you stand strong. When the culture says souls don’t exist or don’t matter, you live like they’re the most important things in the universe, because they are.
The Invitation Still Stands
Maybe you’re listening to this and recognizing your own low view of your soul. You’ve never signed a blood contract to give it away, but you’ve lived like your soul doesn’t matter. You’ve traded eternal things for temporary pleasures. You’ve valued your spiritual life at the price of whatever brought immediate satisfaction. You’re not alone – we’ve all been there.
Here’s the good news that should humble and amaze you: despite humanity’s low view of souls, God’s high view never changes. Despite Karina treating her soul as worth $1,180, God says it’s worth the blood and brutal murder of His own Son. Despite our society’s spiritual bankruptcy, God’s offer to buy us back and set us free remains infinitely generous.
Romans 10:13 promises that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Not because your soul suddenly becomes valuable to you, but because it has always been valuable to Him. Not because you finally recognize your worth, but because He has never forgotten it.
The Recovery of Wonder
What would happen if humanity rediscovered the value of the soul? What if people started living like eternal beings instead of just consumers? What if we all woke up to the reality of the sacred?
Cities would change. The political rage that sets neighborhoods on fire would cool into respectful dialogue. The anger that leads to looting and riots would transform into constructive action. The hatred that drives someone to attempt assassination would give way to love for those who don’t think the same way we do, or have different outlooks on life and purpose than we do. Families would heal. Art would transcend. Work would gain meaning instead of just a paycheck. Relationships would deepen – all relationships: romantic, family, friends, neighbors, even just acquaintances. Life would recover its purpose. The cheap plastic existence that characterizes so much of modern life would give way to something real, something weighty, something eternal.
This isn’t nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. This is a call to remember what humanity has forgotten, to value what God values, to treat as precious what He calls precious. It’s a call to stop selling out for designer dolls and start living for the Designer of the universe.
Your Soul’s True Value
You need to understand what Karina didn’t: your soul has infinite value, but not because of anything in you or what you did. Its value comes from the One who made it and the One who paid for it with his death and resurrection. You’re made in God’s image according to Genesis 1:27. Christ’s blood was the purchase price according to 1 Peter 1:18-19.
Against that valuation, every earthly treasure looks like trash. Paul said in Philippians 3:8 that he considered everything garbage compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. He understood what many in our society have forgotten: eternal things matter infinitely more than temporal things.
The Labubu dolls Karina bought are already losing their cultural relevance. The concert she attended is a fading memory. But souls? Souls are forever. Your choices echo in eternity. Your life has implications that will outlast the existence of our universe.
The Challenge Before You
There is a challenge before you. Tomorrow morning, you’ll wake up in the same culture that produced Karina. The same forces that convinced her to sell her soul for toys will start their work on you too. The same spiritual amnesia that infected her threatens to infect you.
But you don’t have to succumb to it. You can live with eternal perspective in a temporal world. You can value souls in a culture that denies them. You can treat as sacred what others treat as silly. You can recognize the infinite worth of what others throw away.
Every time you choose integrity over convenience, you’re declaring your soul’s value. Every time you prioritize the eternal over the immediate, you’re pushing back against the culture’s lies. Every time you treat someone with dignity because they bear God’s image, you’re testifying to truths most of those around you have forgotten.
Living with Eternal Perspective
The early Christians turned the world upside down because they lived like souls mattered. They valued eternal life over temporal comfort. They chose martyrdom over compromise. They saw reality through the lens of eternity, and it changed everything.
You’re called to do the same. Not necessarily to die for your faith, though that may come, but to live for it. To value what lasts over what fades. To invest in souls rather than stuff. To build God’s kingdom rather than your own empire.
When someone asks why you live differently, why you don’t chase what everyone else chases, why you value what everyone else ignores, you’ll have an answer. You’ll tell them about the God who valued souls enough to die for them, about the Savior who paid the ultimate price for what the world treats as worthless.
The Final Word
Karina’s story isn’t ultimately about her or Dimitri or even those creepy dolls. It’s about a generation that has lost its soul while denying souls exist. It’s about humanity reaching the logical conclusion of materialism: everything for sale, nothing sacred, eternity forgotten.
But it’s also about the opportunity before you. In a world that has forgotten the value of souls, you can be a reminder. In a culture that trades the eternal for the temporary, you can demonstrate different priorities. In a generation that has lost its way, you can point to THE Way, THE Truth, and THE Life.
Your soul isn’t for sale because it’s already been bought by the blood of Christ. Its value isn’t determined by market forces but by divine love. Its destiny isn’t destruction but glory, only though if you recognize the treasure you carry and stop trading it for toys.
So the next time you’re tempted to value temporary things over eternal souls, remember Karina. Remember those dolls that seemed so important at the time. Remember that contract she signed in blood. Then remember the other contract signed in blood… the one who bled on your behalf. The one whose blood really matters, whose valuation really counts.
Choose wisely. Not because you might accidentally sell your soul, but because you might waste it living like it doesn’t matter. And that would be the greatest tragedy of all: not that humanity sold its soul for too little, but that it forgot its soul had infinite value all along. In a world racing toward spiritual bankruptcy, be the one who remembers what souls are worth. Be the one who lives like eternity matters. Be the one who refuses to laugh when sacred things are mocked.
Because if Karina’s story teaches anything, it’s that when humanity forgets the value of the soul, it doesn’t just lose its soul. It loses its humanity. And that’s a price too high for all the Labubu dolls in the world… even if you do throw in a couple of concert tickets.
To Those Who Think It’s Too Late
Before we end, there is one more item I’d like to address. Maybe you’re listening to this with a knot in your stomach. Not because of Karina’s story, but because of your own. Maybe you actually tried to sell your soul years ago in some ritual you now regret. Maybe you signed something, said something, did something that you believe permanently separated you from God.
Or maybe you never signed anything in blood, but you’ve lived so long in compromise that you feel sold out anyway. You’ve done things, terrible things, that make you believe you’re beyond God’s reach. You think your soul is either gone or so stained it might as well be.
Listen carefully: As I said before… you cannot sell what doesn’t belong to you, and you cannot lose what Christ refuses to let go. If the Devil has convinced you that some ritual, some contract, some moment of darkness has permanent power over you, he’s playing his oldest trick – making you believe his lies have more power than God’s truth.
No pentagram drawn on a floor, no words spoken at midnight, no blood on any paper, no ritual you performed has more power than the blood of Jesus Christ. First John 4:4 says greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. That’s not poetic language; that’s legal reality in the spiritual realm. God’s prior claim overrides all others.
If you’ve believed for years that you’re too far gone, that you sold out too completely, that you are damaged goods spiritually, then Satan has kept you in chains that Jesus already broke. The door to your cell has been open this whole time; you just believed it was locked.
Come home. Whatever you did, wherever you’ve been, whatever contracts you think you signed, come home. The Father is watching the road, waiting for you to come back – He’ll run to you, not to condemn your actions, but to celebrate your return. Your soul has always belonged to Him. Time to stop letting the enemy convince you otherwise.
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