Terrifying

"I want you to get swept away out there. I want you to levitate. I want you to sing with rapture and dance like a dervish. Yeah, be deliriously happy, or at least leave yourself open to be. I know it's a cornball thing, but love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without. I say, fall head over heels, find someone you can love like crazy and who will love you the same way back. How do you find him? Well, you forget your head and you listen to your heart…’Cause the truth is, honey, there's no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love, well, you haven't lived a life at all. But you have to try, because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived."

So what’s a dervish again?

In the movie Meet Joe Black, Anthony Hopkins’s character uses these words to describe the passion he wishes for his daughter in life, where “lightning could strike,” as he would go on to say, at any moment and sweep her off her feet into joyous rapture and passion and love. I find these words a beautiful albeit humorous picture of the sort of joy and passion I wish for my own life, "to sing with rapture and dance like a dervish," and I imagine many of you reading this would as well The thought of such a life filled with constant excitement and adventure as we navigate the raging seas of life and desperately long and pray to discover love…

Trekking along day to day, week to week, year to year, it’s often difficult, I’ve found as I’m sure you have as well, to maintain even the thought, let alone the feeling and pursuit, of such excitement, such rapture. And this is true whether we are speaking of relationships with others or our faith. It’s not even so far as that we become ensnared in despair or hopelessness as much as contentedness, the comfort of routine, or possibly even what we see as coming to terms with reality. Not that these things are inherently evil by any means, however we must ask ourselves when comfort becomes complacency, when routine becomes apathy, when reality becomes compromise.

When we simply become so content with our current positions and situations that even if we begin to realize we have ceased our growth and progress, if we recognize that we have let our dreams and expectations slip even in the slightest, and then even if we have decided we wish to recapture that joy and passion, we never quite seem to get around to it. Not that we don't care, it's just that we're so wrapped up in this reality and putting one foot in front of the other that we cannot, or do not, summon the desire and fortitude to suck it up and start sprinting, throwing off and surrendering whatever needs to be in order to run, to jump, to dance, to overflow with rapture and passion. To strive for those dreams and expectations of love and joy that we once wished for just doesn’t have a place in our reality anymore. And for us as Christians, called to Love, to lavish, possessors of more hope than could hope to be quantified, even the idea of that overwhelming passion not being an integral, foundational aspect of our lives could be terrifying.

"I need to build my faith sometimes,
But I am so comfortable in mine…”
~FM Static

Work, play, school, even just life in general can make the pursuit of passion that we’re just too tired to even think about like we used to, or in our indecisive, erratic humanity we just can’t seem to keep that constant focus like we pray we could. It is hard, there’s no doubt of that; the reality of life is tough to be sure. But still, this is a reality that we must deal with quite often in the pursuit of anything we dream of, including the passion and Love our God wishes for us to grasp and strive for.

It’s not even that we find ourselves in the seemingly inescapable, desolate tunnel of utter brokenness. Maybe we really have reached a point in the race, in the pursuit, where we really are just tired. Or maybe we somehow find ourselves here and just don’t know how to get out of this place of terrifying comfort, where to even start, possibly because we barely even know how we got to this point in the first place. Any number of possibilities could lead us to the point where fiery passion becomes coals, not totally dead, but not exactly a blaze either.

And I’ll be honest, I don’t have even the slightest clue of how to 100% effectively combat this. I have no magical three step process to reigniting the passion of the pursuit. I struggle with this just as much as anyone.

But I do know this.
This is no way to live, truly live.
But I also know this.
We have hope.

Our God has never once in the span of eternity lost His complete and utter passion, His Love, for us fickle and complacency-prone people. He knew what we would be, what we would do, what we would become before He even created us, and yet create us He did. And even in our passion, even in our contentedness, even in our apathy, even in our doubt, even in our failure, the fires of His passion never die down. Even as we grow older, even if we view ourselves as completely different people, even when our mindsets, our thought processes, our ideas of anything and everything change, even when we begin to walk, perhaps even crawl, instead of sprinting with reckless abandon towards the Love He desires for us to experience, He is exactly the same God.

Exactly the same Love.

And if He has anything to do with it, I find it hard to believe that we can go very far at all before we are once again swept off our feet by His pursuit of us. Us, His love. Not that we can or should dilly dally around waiting for such a thing to happen, but at the very least with this hope we can remember. Remember our faith, our joy, our passion, our true hope and Love. And here we can somehow find that motivation and drive to strive and sprint, to cling to our desires and passion with conviction instead of compromise. To at least more than just want to. Because our God really does love us that much.

"Take me as I am, 'cause I'm going
I was too scared to start, now I'm too scared to let go
Take me as I am, 'cause I'm growing
But it's so hard to tell when I'm not used to this so..."
~FM Static

As Anthony Hopkins’s character put so well, if you haven’t found that passion in life, “well, you haven't lived a life at all. But you have to try, because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived."

It is okay for us to find comfort and contentedness, but we must also remember the potentially terrifying difference and very fine line between these and the potentially terrifying concepts of apathy, complacency, and compromise. Jesus and the Love that He brought and taught was not set on simply being comfortable, in fact He shook, rattled, and rolled the worlds of people until their very foundations came crashing down and any comfort and contentment they thought they had all but evaporated, and His Love still does this. Neither is the Christianity of the Bible a faith of or for the complacent. And there can be no underestimating the importance of remembering the possible applications of these thoughts to both relationships with other people and a relationship with our God. So can we at least try? Because it really is all about the pursuit, and the pursuit really is all about Love. A Love that is so simply terrifyingly awesome that nothing is worth compromising it. And the very thought of doing so should be terrifying.

But then again…

“If everything comes down to love,
Then just what am I afraid of?”
~Addison Road

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