What do you do with passion?
What do you do with that gutwrenching, heartbreaking, deep, firey yearning for whatever drives you? What do you do with all that turmoil, that sickness, that desperate every-fibred longing for your desires? How do you react when you feel that pull at everything you are, have been and will be being wrapped up completely in something other than yourself?
Do you cry? Do you shut down? Do you get angry?
How do we deal with that? Its terrifying, wreckless, aching, urgent--painful even. Passion is synonymous with suffering for a reason. Passion is not always pleasant. In fact, I would say that it shows up most often when we are missing something--when we feel that we are lacking in some aspect, or relationship. When we want something more and feel empty, or lonely, or isolated for lack of it. Thats because once we have something its easy to become desensitized to it. Its kind of like kids with christmas toys. They spend weeks counting down the days until christmas, waiting anxious, longing for it to come sooner. You can almost see the pain in their eyes--what? twenty days until christmas--its so far! And finally Christmas comes, and they recieve the gifts they were so passionate about--the things they longed for so badly. And they love their new toys, and their passion carries over into a joyful form--but what happens in a week? Two weeks? Next december? Are they still excited about those toys? Or are they longing for something new, something they dont already have?
Its easy to feel passionate about romance when you're a single twenty something.
Its easy to feel passionate about following Jesus at a church camp.
Its easy to feel passionate about helping the marginalized when they're right in front of you.
But what about when you're not? When you're somewhere else? When you've distanced yourself? When the novelty has worn into the common place?
And also what is the result of the passion in our own lives? How does it effect our behavior?
How do we control passion for good in our lives? Because passion is the driving force behind all of our desires and therefore all of our thoughts and then all of our actions--both godly and sinful it can lead to either good or selfish outcomes. That said, it is not a bad thing, its powerful and unpredictable and dangerous but it is not bad. Its like a small small reflection of God in our own lives.
Over and over in the Bible we see God and Jesus filled with such awesome passion. God's longing for the Israelites in the Old testament to return to him from their own selfish passions-His passion for humanity to be reunited with Him being so great that He allows His own son to die for it- Jesus' desire for the Jews and their religious leaders to embrace the wonderful freedom of God and hope of the Kingdom instead of the legalism and judgement of the law appears over and over in the New Testament- the entire Bible is made of books oozing passion. It's a part of who God is, and therefore a part of who we are as well.
So what do we do with it?
