Passion and Joy.
Both are tricky words for me.
I’m perhaps beginning to turn the corner on joy. I grew up in a family that claimed to be joyful but hid secrets of sexual trauma, addiction, and abuse. We were a happy, faith-filled family—or so I was told. There were good times, but they were built on a foundation of eggshells, emotional drama, and criticism. Joy, inevitably, has been hard for me to authentically claim. Through therapy, prayer, action, and community, combined with a willingness to face my suffering, I have journeyed to a place where I am starting to glimpse a real, circumstance-transcending, and honest joy.
Most often joy sneaks up on me in my times of prayer and meditation in the morning, sometimes through tears of grief or pain. Occasionally, I sense it in the feeling of autumn sunshine on my skin or through the comfort of finally being able to wear my well-worn and well-loved boots. Most resiliently, it is becoming something I know in my bones as I grow in the knowledge that I am held by God, even as I am—both where I am healed and where I remain fragmented.
With passion, though, I am still waiting for resolve. Bringing the word to mind makes my heart twinge with angst and discomfort. I have lived much of my life at full throttle. I went to a college that excelled in work-hard/play-hard. To ‘rest’ was really ‘to crash’ and sleep around the clock until there was enough in the tank to go at life again. I tried to take that energy into my post-college work life and suffered burnout (for the first of many times) after just eight weeks on the job. I had recurrent chest infections that were ultimately found to be due to stress. I lived my passions in the extremes, in the red zone.
I believe God has given me passions to embrace.
Yet these passions for teaching and ministry are in the process of being redefined, even redeemed. I look at those younger than I and see the innocent passion I used to have. That’s not me anymore. I look at those older than I and see mature passion, work, and commitment to many causes. That’s not me either (yet?).
My passions today feel theoretical. I wonder what God is up to—because I don’t believe they were all fantasies formed in denial. They were the fruit of seeking God and receiving surprising answers.
But today?
Today, I don’t know how to hold them.
I don’t know what the answer is, but this is what I have learned: In the past, I wasn’t gentle or kind to myself. When my passions are redeemed, I trust it will be when I am able to hold them compassionately and not to my detriment or ill-health. In the past, I thought what I did mattered more than who I was. My hope is that when my passion comes back online, it will be from a place of being the child God made me, freely and in abundance—from knowing who I am and to whom I belong. Then my passion will not be striving nor addiction, but what it was supposed to be all along: a gift.
