Wednesday, April 4, 2012

A Passionate Life




                                                                                                       SJJeffries 2011



                                                    A Passionate Life



   As a "forever" Christian, I have always considered the fact that I was born a Christian much like Jewish people are born into their religion. Christianity "flows" through my veins both culturally and spiritually.  When I was too young to be a real Christian, that is too young to decide to follow Jesus , walk down the aisle  and be baptized , I would pretend to be a Christian. I would pretend to take communion using” kool aide” and chewing gum, instead of bread and juice. Some how I knew being a Christian was more about being allowed to partake in communion than what I did or said. I reasoned that what I did or said, though important, did not matter as God was a forgiving God and whatever I did He would always forgive me.



For most of my growing up years I felt a strong "passion" for Christianity. I don't remember ever not feeling that passion and desire to be as good as I could be. Along with these feelings of passion came a natural compassion for other people, especially my parents.  I soon took these feelings to the extreme in that I tried so hard to always "please" my parents by being the perfect son. All in all my self worth  always seemed to balance on a thin string as I tried to live up to my parents expectations and the expectations of what I thought it meant to be a Christian.



Growing up my definition of "the passion of Christ or Christianity" would probably concern the passion of God and the fact that he loved me so very much that he sent Jesus to us to teach us how to be good and than hung him on a cross to suffer such a brutal death and die for us and somehow arise again to go up into heaven.  Pretty much every Easter  for many years was spent taking on the pain both of Jesus who was the sacrifice for me and of God who had to watch his son die in such a horrible way.  I remember a lot of Good Fridays, a name I never understood, business and even school would come to a halt at about two o'clock in the afternoon and all would morn the death of Jesus. In my memories and probably imagination, I think the sky would even darken a little much as we imagine it did on the first Easter.



I was a teenager before I one day looked in the mirror at myself, and made a conscious decision to make an effort to try and please myself instead of always trying to please someone else.  Realizing that my parents and my church had given me a pretty good idea of what it means to be a "good" person, it was time for me to make my own choices about my faith and what that faith meant to me.  It was than that I began to allow myself to question my faith.  I know the questions had always been  there just beneath the surface, but I had  restrained myself from asking these questions.  I soon redefined my interpretation of "the passion of Christ" to mean the passion of living my life as Christ taught us and a passionate desire to ask questions and learn what that means for me in a personal way.



Kevin and Wyatt, my pastors, taught a Sunday School series on” Living the Question”.  It was in this class that I first realized I was all ready spending my life” Living the Question” and that this was OK. It was often disheartening for me to question some of the traditions and teachings that always rang true in my heart but often did not balance with my brain.  It was alright to question and also all right that I did not expect to ever have a certain and definite  Yes or no, right or wrong answer to most questions of faith and religion.  We are taught at a very early age to think and reason for ourselves. In math, in politics, even in ethics, common sense was the rule. In matters of religion and Christianity we were expected  generally to accept all that we were taught on "blind faith".   It is such a relief to know now that I can look at my faith with eyes wide open and not fear that my faith will crumble with the first new idea or concept of what Jesus was all about.



Looking back at a life of being a Christian, I still feel inside like that child that was so eager  to be a Christian that I pretended to take communion. I still have a real passion for being a Christian. I would like to know how to pass the passion I feel on to my children, kind of like a legacy. But the truth is each person must seek out their own passions in both life as in faith.  It is these passions that make the blood flow a little quicker in our veins and reminds us that we are alive and that God is there with us as a loving God.






No comments:

Post a Comment