In this chapter C.S. Lewis talks about Eros, the sexual love. The thing that stuck out to me the most was when C.S. Lewis describes passion. He says that Eros, or the passionate love, is more like the dive before the actual swim. Eros, although it promises permanence, is not what keeps love lasting. Once it has started, it will take discipline and commitment to keep it alive and make progress. Again, Lewis describes passion as a kind of garden. A garden is full of life and beauty, and it can give that life to others who are around. But the garden cannot weed itself or fence itself on its own. It needs to taken care of. A garden when it is simply left to nature won’t be a garden anymore. God has place man to attend and keep watch over the garden.
Although Lewis was probably thinking about passion as Eros when he explained it this way, I think this way of thinking about passion can apply to our passion for God as well. There are times where we get our passion for God fired up, whether through a retreat or a sermon, and we are excited about living our life for God again. But when that passion slowly fades away after some time, we don’t know what to do. We sometimes even think that there’s something wrong with us because we’re not feeling that fiery passion that we once had. In reality that fiery moment was meant to just get our walk started, just as a dive is what gets our swimming started. We cannot always want that feeling in order to be close to God, just like we can’t swim back to shore over and over just to dive again. If that happens, we make no progress.
Another place where I’ve seen this aspect of passion was out in the mission field. As a MK, I lived in Uganda and Kenya 16 years, and I had the opportunity to meet many missionaries. I there’s one thing I’ve learned about missions is that mission is a life style. A lot times people back in our home country expect missionaries to be people who are constantly on fire for God, but in reality, missionaries are people who are just living out their lives, in a sense, like anyone else. The fiery passion filled moment is what gets them started and enables them to stand up and volunteer to go to foreign lands. But when they get there, it’ll be their faithful persistence and discipline that will enable them to stay in that land for the years to come. We cannot expect our fiery passion to always be there to fuel us. Once we get it started, it’ll take discipline, perseverance and persistence along with the grace of God that will enable us to finish the good race.
I really enjoyed how you took this and applied it to other areas of life, both in general and personally! It did not occur to me in class today to look at diving and then swimming or planting and then tending to a garden as a way to view our spiritual lives as well. It is so true that we dive when we have spiritual highs, but it can be so hard to keep swimming and stay afloat. We need to maintain a relationship with God in order to keep the weeds out of our garden so that our beauty in Him can be seen by all.
답글삭제I like how you compared this to a passion for God and I would argue that this is still a form of Eros. After all scripture tells us that Jesus is the bridegroom and we the church are his bride. The old testament is full of references where God is portrayed as the jilted lover of humanity, especially in Hoses, who keeps on bringing hi beloved back to him.
답글삭제I really enjoyed this insightful post. I like how you tied a fiery moment to the art of diving.It's true, we need discipline and persistence to maintain our relationship with Christ. Sadly, we lose many new believers when they have only the fiery moment, and not the discipline.
답글삭제Nice job, Josh. I enjoyed your post.