April 15, 2005

With spring comes a collage of sights, sounds, and sensations that flood the experience. The green of spring is unlike that of any other time of year, the daffodils and tulips show their shy heads, and the buzzing of bugs begins its pre-summer drone.

Of course, bugs are not the only things buzzing about. The yearly phenomenon of spring sports also starts afresh, with the energy and zest that those too long in the gloom of winter’s twilight enthusiastically embrace. As soccer and baseball in particular get underway, children and their parents (who are often much more passionate about the games than are their kids) will line the fields and will then passionately cheer and jeer their way through the season.

Passion… a word so riddled with various meanings that it can be used almost as a dirty word and yet signifies that remarkable quality by which we summon up untapped energies, reorient our minds with new dreams and ambitions and then begin the whole-hearted pursuit of our heart’s desire.

Passion can be an amazing thing; amazingly fruitful when it rockets us towards helpful and fruitful goals; amazingly destructive and dangerous when it drags us into the pits of lust, greed and proud ambition.

Christians must continually guard their own hearts in this regard. It is easy for our eyes to be drawn by the activity of “winning teams” and the overly-inflated luster of “beating out” other kids (by which we determine that our own children are superior to others).

In recent years, it has repeatedly occurred that fans of sports react to losing (or winning) by resorting to extreme violence and destruction. Nothing new I suppose, but I wonder sometimes if it has been escalating, especially when I hear more and more incidents of parents assaulting other parents at their children’s sports events. What IS wrong with us that we would let it get that far?

And it should be clear too that this isn’t really about sports. Playing sports is a great source of exercise, fun and excitement, the learning of teamwork, and an opportunity to develop initiative. But, although athletic events are sometimes an obvious forum in which some folks make spectacles of their misplaced passions, this is really about anything that supplants God’s place of preeminence as Lord of our lives. Things like career achievement, financial affluence, physical ecstasy, and social approval (to name only a few) too easily and too often become our hearts desires.

Misplaced passions always reap bitter harvests though. Whether we’re talking about getting swallowed up by the lightning-fast pace of the corporate world, keeping up with the Joneses right on into Chapter 11, chemical addictions or STDs or even co-dependent relationships that repeatedly fail and leave us heart-broken, whatever we allow to come before God comes to nothing in the end. This is why it is time right NOW to seek after God. This is why it is imperative that we begin to passionately pursue the most important thing of all before the setting of another sun.

“Remember this, fix it in your mind, take it to heart…. Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose shall stand, and I will do what I please” (Isaiah 46:8-10a).

Are we willing to live with the “end in mind?” I hope so. It’s a shame to think that we might pursue all our own purposes, not believing perhaps, that only His purposes and plans will last for eternity.

“The path of the righteous is level; O upright One, You make the way of the righteous smooth. Yes, LORD, walking in the way of Your laws, we wait for You; Your name and renown are the desire of our hearts. My soul yearns for You in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for You” (Isaiah 26:7-9a).

(Thom Mollohan has ministered in southern Ohio the past nine and a half years and is the pastor of Pathway Community Church.   He and his wife are the parents of four children.  He may be reached by email at pastorthom@pathwaygallipolis.com).