Problems with Passion

I often look at passion as a negative thing. I hear things like this...I got in an argument and I got passionate and it got me in trouble...I got caught in a moment of passion, and now she's pregnant, we didn't mean for that to happen...I better be quiet now because or my passion is going to get me in trouble.

What if we looked at passion differently? What if we noticed that the problem was not so much our passion, but our direction.

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch write about this in their book The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church (this book is excellent if you love dreaming about the church, and what it could be - I will probably post more about it over the next while), they say that, "Passion is only evil when it remains in the directionless state, when it refuses to be subject to holy direction, when it will not accept the direction that leads toward God."

This is a beautiful picture of passion. The Church is often known to be a place where passion is to be suppressed and often not even talked about, but really the Church should be about directing our passions to the holy. Even our passions about sex? Yes. Even our passions about driving fast cars? Why not.

Let's allow ourselves passion, but let's point it in the the right direction, a holy direction.

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