Mobile

If I had to choose one word to describe my life over the past several months, it would be "mushy."

I've grown lethargic. Apathetic. Lazy. I've become intellectually mushy. Socially mushy. Physically mushy. And, to be honest, spiritually mushy. And maybe you've found yourself in such a situation at times as well. You don't feel sharp or disciplined. Your life is just feeling a little...blah, and it become increasingly harder to roll yourself out of bed in the morning or off of your couch in the evening.

This last week, I had the chance to join in something that I sorely needed. It's something that I used to do every week, and I now realize that I probably didn't value it near as much as I should have.

While visiting friends in Joplin, Missouri, I attended the chapel service at my alma mater of Ozark Christian College, and there I saw a lot of people who were passionate. As the worship band sang, I heard several hundred students singing. And as the sermon was preached, I saw these same students pull out their Bibles and follow along in the text. There was a sense of excitement in the room. It seemed like people wanted to be there, and they were stoked about what was happening in that place.

I also had a chance to chat with a friend who is soon moving to Japan to work with a church plant in an urban area there, and I was able to sense her passion. She's excited about where God is leading her in her life, and she's excited about what the God is doing in a nation where the gospel is not well-known, and she's passionate about the opportunities that exist for the church there.

Passion is the opposite of the mushiness that has been so prevalent in my own life, and it was re-energizing to be around such passionate people this week. I realized that I need to become passionate about something. I need something to be excited about. Because right now, the thing I look forward to the most each day is going back to bed at night. But I don't think that's the way we were meant to go through life.

So where does passion come from? As I sat in on that chapel service, I realized that it begins with God. He is at the center of it all, and the first step has to be to rekindle an excitement and passion for one's relationship with him.

In his book The Shack, William Paul Young compares God's proper place in a believer's life as the center of a mobile. Everything else revolves around him and only has meaning in their connection with him. I've always liked that imagery. Life finds its greatest meaning and value when God is smack dab in the middle of it. Everything else moves around him. So when one's passion for God is allowed to cool, other healthy passions tend to follow suit, and before you know it you're spending the evening wiping Cheeto crumbs off your chest while watching yet another sitcom rerun on TV.

I wasn't made to be mushy. I believe that God made us to be passionate people--people who are enraptured by him and stoked about living in this world in which he has placed us and which he has entrusted to us. I've written recently that I need something to get excited about. And that's still true. But this grows first and foremost out of a deep, even desperate relationship with God. Everything else branches from that.

Have you ever felt "mushy?" How do you recapture passion in your life when that happens?