From the Heart

There are a few things that family members told me that I carry with me to this day. Most of the things that I remember my Dad telling me were about having the courage to judge people by the type of person they are instead of what background they were from or how much money they had. My mother said similar things, but the thing I always remember that my mom said was, “Whatever you do, honey, follow your heart!”

When I entered into preparation for full-time ministry, I debated on whether it was really going to be practical. Was I going to make enough money to support myself? Would anybody hire a pudgy bookworm like me to work with teenagers? What if people mistreat me and disrespect me? Shouldn’t I do something more lucrative and practical?

But then I asked myself another set of questions. Would I rather live with making a mistake or live with never following my heart? Would I rather live a life where I pursue the dreams that God has put on my heart, or do something more practical and predictable? I decided to live a life of passion. I followed my heart.

In the process, I have come to the conclusion that passion is ESSENTIAL to life, especially the LIFE we are offered in relationship with Jesus. There is nothing worse than looking at your life, and seeing that all you have ahead is a series of half-hearted obligations. Yet it is easy to get stuck in a rut of passionless living. Why? Because passionless living is safe living. It is comfortable. Half-hearted faith is like those threadbare socks with a hole in the toe and the heel that you have in the back of your dresser drawer. It has sentimental value, and may be helpful in an emergency, but is pretty useless for day to day use. If the Good News of Jesus is not something I can and should give my everything to than it is nothing at all.

What is true of us individually is also true of us as a churches. If we view our lives in Christian community as simply a nice thing to do, or an obligation to be endured than there are a lot of better things we can do with our time than come to church. If our purpose is to be comfortable and feel good there are several better options. But, Christians are called to be people on a mission. A mission of giving our whole selves unreservedly to God so that can in turn reach the whole world with the love that he shares with us in an unrestrained, irrational, crazy, passionate abandon. Will God find us willing to be faithful to him in that way? Even if it hurts or makes us uncomfortable? If so, great things are ahead of us that we cannot even imagine. If not...what’s the point?