Passion

A pomegranate looks like an ordinary fruit on the outside, but when you cut it open, it’s filled with individual seeds, spilling out with life waiting to happen. That’s what passion is: those little seeds of life in each of us; the things God has put in us to do and to be in this world. I feel myself bursting with these seeds most of the time. I think it makes me who I am — I love to love what I love. Passion is not just loving something – it’s loving to love something. It’s a desire to keep loving something, constantly, always, forever. It’s the adrenaline behind the hard things we do for no apparent reason. It’s the joy we receive from seeing the things we love become what they are meant to be. It is, at its core, completely unreasonable. Saintliness makes no sense to someone who is not passionate about pursuing God. Motherhood makes no sense to someone who does not desire a baby. Passion is energetic and compelling and it fuels the fires of our deepest longings.

As I think about my passions, I find I can place nearly all of them (there are too many, I know) into four different categories. I am, first of all, passionate about creating a sense of home. I love natural light and kitchens full of comfort food and game nights and backyards lit with lightning bugs and children trying to catch them. I suppose this means I am passionate about coziness. I want a space full of candlesticks and puzzles and books and slippers and records and blankets. I want stacks of cookbooks in my kitchen, and a fireplace, and a bathtub. Ever since I was a kid I have found joy in nesting – in finding corners of the world to belong in, whether it be an armchair or a tree. Nesting is in my bones, in my bloodstream, and if forms the foundation of everything that comes next. Everything must be born in a nest.

I am also passionate about childhood. When I was young, maybe in 3rd or 4th grade, I remember a moment of feeling misunderstood, of stomping up to my room and swearing I would never forget what it felt like to be a child. I don’t treat children like adults, but I do treat them like people. I treat them like they have important things to say, to create, to bring into this world. They don’t have important things to do later – they are important right now. But even alongside their inherent dignity and personhood, I find I have much to learn from children. Our imaginations go stale as adults; they get brittle and tired and they begin to despair that the things we dreamt of as children are possible. Children, for the most part, aren’t jaded yet. They believe. They ask good questions and they’re smart and they look for what is actually real, but they believe. I want that to be a core piece of my life: childlikeness. I am passionate about nurturing it in young people and in myself.

I am passionate about teaching — I love to help people grow. I love crafting my words so that they are simple and concise, and so that they don’t patronize or assume. I am passionate about simple, practical teaching. I get lost in the esoteric and don’t find that it lands well most of the time. I want to spend my time planting seeds in people, and then tending to and nurturing those seeds until they become saplings, and then young trees, and then trees that bear fruit. I want to teach people in a way that actually works, and this usually means getting our hands dirty. I don’t know a lot of people that have naturally felt the need to apply something they read in a book. We tend to think we know something because we read it. Actually, we know something when we do it; when it becomes a habit. I don’t just want to teach minds – I want to teach bodies, I want to create lifestyles. Like a teaching hospital where you learn surgery by practicing in a operating room, I want to teach people how to live well in their actual lives. 

Then there’s the final thing, but maybe it’s also the whole thing: healing. I want to see people made whole. I thought of so many ways to frame this: Is my passion to rid the world of poverty? Is it to deal with the roots of racism and prejudice and bitterness? Is it justice? Ministry? A crusade for housing? But at the root it’s not any of these things – and when these things, these ideas, are the goal, I get completely lost. When the goal is eradicating a negative thing, there is no ground to stand on, no positive vision to aim for. Eradicating poverty is not a goal. Initiating a movement of healing and wholeness, though? That is something I can get behind. It hits on everything: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual reality. When we pursue healing, we pursue a flourishing world for all of us.

So that’s the passion: to create spaces in the world where people, especially children, can settle into home, heal their wounds, and flourish. And all of this, for me, is about the Kingdom of God. I can’t escape that reality, and I don’t want to. The Kingdom is home. It is where children matter, where deep healing can take place, where people can become whole. The Kingdom is where the dividing walls of hatred and division come down, where we can love each other well and commune in our differences. The Kingdom, for me, is a table — all of us eating together, sharing our lives, sharing our cultures, sharing our movement toward God, and God’s movement toward us. And the Kingdom is filled with the presence and light of a good King. Passion is not the ending, and we should not treat it as such. Our passions are only the seeds, meant to be planted in the dirt so that they can produce fruit — so that we can all feast together on the goodness we’ve planted.