A youth pastor of mine once told me that when people act too much based on passion, you usually end up with either babies or dead people. I agree with that when you consider the way we usually sum up passion nowadays – with the Hollywood scenes of one enemy pulling the trigger with such energy and hatred in his eyes, or the passionate kiss between a vampire and emo-chick.
However, I think that when it’s viewed the right way, one of the greatest things you can have in your life is passion. One of the greatest things you can learn to do is develop dreams and develop passion for those dreams.
One of the things that I finally began to realize a few years back when I was just getting out of high school was this idea that I am able to live for something that is a lot bigger than just my own little life-story. In fact, not only am I able to do that, but I am actually meant to do that! There was that moment in time when all of the sudden I knew that I could either keep going day to day with my own little adventures in homework and the smoker’s pit, or I could actually somehow become part of something that was magnificent and moving.
I was actually called to be with God and live for God.
This came as a shock to me because the world around me was so caught up with focusing inward on ourselves and building ourselves up first before we give of ourselves to others. And, to an extent that is true. We cannot give what we haven’t first received. We have to take care of ourselves spiritually, emotionally, physically, and all of the ways that we can be healthy. We aren’t meant to neglect ourselves and, thus, grow to be unhealthy people; however, there was this moment that it clicked in that life is so much bigger than my own mind and my own feelings. I was being developed for a purpose.
At one point in the New Testament, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment in all of the Word of God is and he answers, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor.” (Meaning everybody you come in contact with!) This was quoted to me again this past week and it really sunk in again that when I read that passage, the only person who isn’t mentioned is…me!
I do matter so much to God; so much in fact that Jesus died to take away my sins, yet in the way I live my life from day to day it matters more how I love God and love others than how others can benefit me and build me up.
You can spend your life very empty, straying away from God and focusing only on yourself or you can enter into this greater story that God has intended for you to live.
I knew as I was in my final years of high school and my first year of University that it was time for something bigger. It was time to dream again and see what this “bigger life” looked like for me.
Be back soon!
P. Corey
