Passions

I had an idea for what I wanted to write about today. Slowly over the past 6 hours I've been gradually researching it (among other things as my day permitted) but I just haven't been able to focus on it.

It was this inability to focus on the subject that I wanted to talk about, that enlightened me to what I needed to reflect on instead.

I wrote the other night briefly as a status update that I felt ignorant, incompetent and incapable. The background on this was that I was running lights for the Saturday night service, and there were some.....problems. I lack the knowledge to be able to fix the specific problems that came up, as did anyone else who was there. Unfortunately Justin had to come in and fix what had happened.

Justin is who i'm filling in for in the first place. So that he does NOT have to be there.

So I was very frustrated at my own lack of expertise in the area I was volunteering in, I'm still not entirely done beating myself up about that either.

I brought this up at our small group last night, and Jenny pointed out something about the event that hadn't occurred to me yet. She said that she thinks my frustration doesn't stem so much from that one event but is much larger than that. That the origin of my frustration comes from my feelings that i'm not doing what I'd want to do. That i'm filling in these areas at church as...well...filler. That i'm frustrated because i'm spending my time doing things that I am not passionate about.

More so, i'm frustrated because I KNOW the things that I am passionate about and the things that I want to be doing (at least in a very general sense). And i'm not doing them. I'm frustrated with the failure and ignorance because I would have been even frustrated with the success of the activity, so it was magnified in the failure. So, what am I passionate about?

What I'm passionate about:

• Listening to people
• Talking with people
• Learning things about God, about the church, about life, about the world through study and interaction
• Teaching things that I learn in communicative ways to others, and hopefully learning as well through it
• Helping people through their problems, helping them to become more of what God calls them to be. Helping to get over the pain and the anger and disappointments of life.
  
• Creating/organizing ways to achieve that goal
• Identifying and solving problems in existing programs. Making programs and procedures as efficient, effective and faithful as possible
• Analyzing failures and shortfalls. Not to wallow in them, but to stop them from occurring again. To really dig into the garbage and get over the personal/corporate hump that is stopping up the progress
• Helping to cast vision. Discerning what needs to be done alongside others and finding ways to make it so
• Leading, challenging and motivating others to achieve those goals
  

Over the past five--six years, I wouldn't have put any of those on the list. The list would be shorter. I would probably only have "playing music" and "cooking" on it.

They don't even make the cut any longer.

They seem to just pale in comparison of a sense of fulfillment. I still somewhat enjoy the activities, but I am no longer passionate about either. I doubt even a little. This has come to light especially lately as I have tried reading books/materials related to either field. They no longer "do it" for me. And yes, I do both the activities themselves, and it's not much better.

But I know I had all these passions before. I remember them quite vividly. I remember the things that I did in relation to them.

And I know why I stopped.

I know what caused me to bury these passions, to convince myself that I was not worthy of experiencing the joy and fulfillment that I did every moment while living with these things in mind and living out these purposes in the past.

I deadened myself to my own passions. To the passions and talents that God has given and entrusted me with. I've thrown myself into a state of barely being conscious while I'm awake. To merely zone out as much as possible until I go to sleep, so I can wake up and zone out to make the time go by faster until I can go to sleep again.

But I can't seem to be able to do it anymore.

God has been stirring up my old passions. He's been using NPC to do it, but still. When I'm away, I feel a need to be there, while I'm there I feel a need to do more, when I leave I want to turn around immediately. It's like a magnet pulling me and I can feel something inside SCREAMING at me that this is where I need to live out and reignite my old passions. That this is where God could and wants to use somebody like me to further his advances. That this place is where I could be of the most good.

The screaming is loudest while I'm there, but it doesn't go away while i'm not. It does however drown out and make insignificant nearly everything else besides my family.

It makes what I've created for my life over the past half decade, my day-to-day even more meaningless and empty than it was before. When I lived every day to just to zone through and fall asleep at night.

I suppose the feeling never went away, but I was able to drown it out. But now IT drowns out everything else, and feeding it just a little only makes it stronger.