Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Ravi on Passion

I tried, I really did, to write a post last night.  I even had an idea, but I just couldn’t get it to come out as anything more than gibberish.  So, I threw in the towel and figured that post wasn’t ready to be written yet and that I must be rushing it.  Tonight’s a new night, and different ideas are percolating through my brain this evening.

When I drove Sydney to school this morning, I happened to catch the brief morning segment by Ravi Zacharias on the radio.  I love him.  He’s got such a gift for framing and phrasing complex issues of Christian living in ways that are both rooted in Scripture and tied to our common experience.  This morning’s segment was about passion, want and need.  His whole idea was that our passions are God-given, but because we are prone to let our focus wander off of God, our passions are prone to being tied in our minds to earthly pleasures (instead of our heavenly treasure).  He talked about how easily our minds fixate on and associate our passions and pleasures with gratifying our physical desires.  We are terribly prone to believing that what we want is actually a need.  The correction to that thinking is to right our focus on God, and to claim our passions as gifts from God.  We are wayward when we let our wants scream “Need me!” in our heads.  I’ve probably taken license with his message from this morning, but it’s these thoughts that I’ve been meditating and praying on today.

I’ve been struck by how this first month of fasting from excess food has served a hugely important role in my understanding of how to live with enough.  Enough fills our needs and effectively filters our wants.  We are blessed just by having enough food on the table for every meal, and even more blessed when we can share it with others.  I’ve lived a fat, dumb and happy life in many ways.  It seems so silly, but I had grown skilled at convincing myself that I needed to eat, which is a thin veil for the fact that I just wanted to eat to fill some other part of me.  In a weird way, I’ve rediscovered my hunger signals.  (And my pants thank me.) 

I’ve also discovered in new and fun ways that I really do have a passion for cooking, and I really do believe it is God-given.  I’ve often thought of cooking as simply a creative outlet, but I think it’s more than that. Cooking for me is a way to celebrate the wonderful, pure foods that God created for us to enjoy.  It is a tangible expression of love.  Well-cooked, simple dishes are a tasty reminder of the beauty found in transformation.  And God is a God of transformation.

What I’ve really, really discovered thus far in FFE is that I keep my passions in right focus when I treat them as a gift from my creator.  Cultivating my passion for God first, and pursuing any other passion I’ve been given second, lets me stay focused on what’s more real, more lasting, and more perfect than anything self-directed passion might bring me. 

I wouldn’t have guessed that this food fast month would have me ruminating about God-given passion and linking it so directly to the distinction between wants and needs.  I pray that the clarity I feel right now will stick with me as we move forward with FFE to fast from other areas of excess in our lives.  We’ve got a week and a half to go with our food fast, and I look forward to how God uses these next days to work His purposes in me and in our family.
   
To God be the glory.  Amen.

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