It’s a wonderful thing to experience passion. Passion and true belief in something always appear thematically throughout movies, books, and television. So often in such a way, in fact, that I think people often start to believe it only exists in fictitious realms, never to be taken as something real --- leave it between the pages in the theatre.
But I know passion. There have been many times in my life where I’ve been a part of something that stirred my soul, something that touched me in a way that it couldn’t be ignored or quenched. One of these, and most intense, was the love of my God; another, the love of a woman. When your faith is all but destroyed and the one you love is lost, passion turns against you. It becomes your rage and hurt and disappointment. It becomes fuel for animosity. These are the valleys.
Then comes decision time. I chose (after some self-indulgence and self-pitying), despite these loses and hurts, to move forward in my life. Standing on the edge, I found myself much like the author of Ecclesiastes. Like the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, with a last breath of desperation and willing to risk it all, I cast all my hope on the God whose existence I wasn’t even sure of anymore…
From: “I Know Passion” by J.L. Eubanks
