Passionate about all the wrong things?
Last week I read a comment on one of my favorite blogs, that I’ve been mulling over and can’t quite get out of my head:
Say that you rail and your rail with your children about all kinds of things: drugs and rock music and Christian music and weak Christianity and sugar and white bread and recycling and "??those"?? people and bad literature and mud on their boots and dirty houses and vaccinations and feeding babies and chocolate and vitamins and natural childbirth, how will your children know which of these things is really important? Maybe one day they find out that some Christians eat sugar and they are nice lovely people who truly love the Lord but from hearing you day in and day out he thought that anyone who ate sugar had a free ticket to hell. Now every single thing you have tried to teach your child ever has been undermined by your passionate intensity.
The context was getting passionate about the small things, and losing sight of an eternal perspective and remaining passionate about Jesus. I can totally agree with this train of thought. At our church, we are often exhorted to "keep the main thing the main thing", referring to the Gospel of Jesus Christ remaining at the center of everything we do, think and say .
This is crucial. If I get caught up on the bandwagon of nutrition or frugality or environmentalism to such an extent that it overrides my passion for Jesus and what He has done for me, then shame on me. I have lost sight of that which is central to everything.
However, if in my zealousness to remain single minded in my passions, I cease to approach life from a Biblical world view that says all truth is God’s truth, and that surely His ways can bring light and life to all elements of living, then I am still missing out on something major.
The writer of the post said that she can tend to "major on the minors", and to that I can heartily add an amen, so can I. But if I am not mistaken, my God is a God of redemption in all of the nooks and crannies of life. While discussing this comment with my husband this morning, he noted that God could have contained the entirety of the Gospel in one sentence, one verse, and yet He has given us a Bible of 66 books, by different authors speaking to a myriad of different issues. Clearly, God has a vested interest in the subtleties, and perhaps, even the "minors".
In all of my teaching, training and passionate discourse with my children, I want them to see first and foremost a woman who (at my very core) has been redeemed by Grace, and who is both inwardly and outwardly being transformed into the very image of Christ, seeking His kingdom first. If they do not see this, then I have missed the mark tragically.
But I also hope they see more than that… a woman who seeks to find God’s best in every situation, in every decision. A woman who is passionately serving her Savior with an intensity that requires her to pursue excellence, stewardship, self-control, discernment and prayerful seeking of her Lord in every area, big and small. And I cannot believe this will undermine my message but rather affirm that everything in my life belongs to the One through whom all things exist.
