Silly Jesus. Loving passionately is for God

I didn't write this, but I like it. It comes to you courtesy of my friend and brother in Christ Colin who used to run paintball and on rainy day occasion a very popular Philosopy class at the summer camp I worked at last summer. He would talk passionately to the mostly Jewish teenagers about many things.
Orange is for the stuff that stuck out to me in what he says about love. Feel free to check him out at My Space. I certainly have always felt cooler for knowing him.


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"I am convinced that God calls us to live passionately in all areas of our life. One of the most difficult of those areas I think is our relationships. After our hearts get broken time and time again, we instinctively want to withdraw, to be more cautious. We naturally want to protect ourselves from being hurt. We want to be safe. But Christ never calls us to a safe life, he calls us to a passionate and dangerous life of loving others.

Jesus loved his disciples and the people he came in contact with a deep intensity and passion. Now, if He was smart, he would have been a little less loving and a little more prudent. I mean, Peter is such a coward- he's never there when the going gets tough. Thomas never believes a thing You say. And Judas, well, there's just something about him that says he's going to stab You in the back. Yet, Jesus loved them all. What was He thinking?! Why did He willingly expose himself to desertion, distrust, and betrayal from his so-called friends, and then keep loving those who came back to Him? Doesn't He realize they're just likely to burn Him again?

Silly Jesus. Loving passionately is for God.

Again, like so many other things, we run into the "foolishness of the Cross." To make our relationships passionate is foolish to the world which values protecting ourselves over others. But in the eyes of God, loving passionately it is part of living life to the fullest. We love with passion. We grieve with passion. And in the end, we heal with just as much passion. We recover a zeal for being filled by God when we do not live safely. God will not just put band-aids on your broken hearts. He is the Great Physician. He will perform triple bypass surgery on them.

Passion is altogether a beautiful and dangerous thing, especially in relationships, but it provides the means of making a love between two people like none other. It should be there from beginning and the end. From the first conversation even to the break-up. We will always hurt, but not always heal. Passion through God is our only hope for real healing beyond the band-aids. I want something more than a broken heart falling apart at the stitches. I want a new and whole heart. And I really believe that can be our hope."