I don’t want to live passively… and I hate it when I do. At times I feel like the proverbial “deer in the headlights”; frozen, numb, ineffective, lifeless. Why is that? What is that?
To add insult to injury, I decided to check a Thesaurus for the word passive and it gave the following synonyms: inert, inactive, unreceptive, reactive and flaccid. All tremendous words of strength and courage, right? Honorable attributes to which anyone would surely aspire. Hold on one second, flaccid? Really? I now view myself as a limp NY strip about to be laid atop the grate of my grill and seared at a fiery 700 degrees. And here’s the problem… this plays out in so many places, in so many ways, every day of my life. I need to ask for my wife’s forgiveness for wronging her, but instead, out of pride, I’m silent. I have a huge project at work, with many moving parts, and fear of not doing it well strikes me, and I’m immobilized and I procrastinate. I want to sit down and write, but all I etch out is two sentences in two hours because my mind drifts to thoughts of food, last night’s episode of the Amazing Race and renewing the tags for the cars by the end of next week. After a long day at work, I finally arrive home and my son runs up to me and begs me to play Legos with him before dinner and I tell him, “no, not now, maybe tomorrow, Daddy’s tired”, and I sit on the sofa to catch the nightly news for 15 minutes before dinner. I’m driving down the road, and as I’m approaching the exit towards my home, someone turns on their blinker to merge into my lane because they need to exit too, and I pretend like I don’t see them and speed up just enough so that they can’t make it in, at least in front of me. And so it happens over, and over, and over, and over.
Does this happen all of the time? No, but I wonder to myself, how often do I live passively and don’t even realize it? On the day-to-day it’s easy to fall prey to those choices, those paths of least resistance so-to-speak, and not even recognize it. It’s subtle. And it’s also destructive; sometimes to others, sometimes to me and sometimes to both. It can destroy the respect of a wife, the hope of a child and the trust of a friend. It weakens my spirit and my resolve. It creates cracks in my character or rather enhances those cracks that already exist in the clay that is my life. And I certainly don’t need any more of those.
So all of that said, how DO I want to live? Well, I want to live intentionally. Tireless. Life is precious and our moments are fleeting. I want mine to count. Everything I do matters. It matters immensely. I don’t want to live weak, but strong. Jesus made it quite clear that I’m no longer my own. In fact, this life isn’t about me at all, despite what I may think. A day will come for me to rest, but until then, I have much to do, and the funny thing is that I’m most fulfilled when I’m looking outside of myself and serving others.
Singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote, “Nothing good comes without a fight”. Join me, as we fight on behalf of the orphaned and vulnerable kids around the world. Let’s not be passive and apathetic, but broken by their plight, and by choice be intentional, living lives of purpose and courage as we make a true, tangible and substantive difference, one child at a time.
Will you join us?
On Behalf of the Kids,
Kevin
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