Passion

1/21/07
"You know the Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died: 'Did he have passion?'."

1/22/07
This is one of my favorite movie lines about Passion (I know sad that I would have categories for my favorite movie lines). It's from a movie (Serendipity) I've seen a hundred times - not because it is my favorite but because it was the first "chick flick" on DVD my family owned. Its very powerful to think about. All of your life culminated in one question - Did you have passion?

The sermon at church yesterday was on Passion surprisingly enough. The past few weeks I've been confused/frustrated at what the sermons were on and was expected to be so this week as well. The premise being that everyone has passions... things within them that they were destined to want to either pursue wholeheartedly or run from for the rest of their lives. This question was posed at the end: "What is your passion?" So it got me thinking...

1/25/07
A year and a half ago I probably would have brushed that question off by assuming that not everyone has passion about things... but now, I have finally begun to allow myself to think of my passions and decide how they fit into my life...

To back track some, last year I took a year-long Christian counseling class - it ended in November. The method of counseling is called exchanged life. Its basic principle to me is that at the point of salvation your old life enslaved to sin was exchanged for a new life in Christ. You have a new identity and heart. So through learning how to counsel people to understand who they were and who they are, I learned a lot about myself. Actually learned more of how to identity with my true self than actually how to help others... It became very clear to me that I lived almost all my Christian life trying to pour myself into a mold of what a Christian should do, think, say, behave, etc. I never knew or even considered that I was unique in the way I related to the Lord. And I even spent a great deal of time trying to convince others of the same thing! Well, I now "know" that this is not true. I reading a great book right now called "Waking the Dead" by John Eldridge and it is helping me awaken to the idea that I am who am for a reason. The things I am passionate about are not things I should be running from or denying.

So what are my passions? Well, it is funny as I think back on other times when I've been posed this question. I remember being in a capstone management class my senior year and our teacher asking us to tell things about ourselves at the being of the class. One thing she wanted to know what we were passionate about - I said people. And I even caught myself and added that that was probably strange for a MIS major. At the time my motive for this answer was that is what any laboring Christians' passion should be... looking into what are my passions now, I think that this is true.

I am deeply passionate about people - esp hurting, defenseless, forgotten people. This makes total sense why I always ended up "attracting" the unlovable girls when it came to ministering on the college campus. There was no "glory" in being with those girls and investing in their lives. There was little result and much labor!! Of course there is always running the risk with such a passion to think that without me these people have no one - I think that there is a risk perversion with every passion. And then the other extreme is fearing that I impacted no one when none of them went on to be great leaders in college ministry or even stuck around... This can be a pain-staking passion, but I can't deny its existence.

More later...