The true secret of life.

Greetings my cyber-friends, sorry for the extended absence. Life has been crazy nuts the last month. I picked my battle, stood by my principles and beliefs, lost my job, and won the victory. Yeah well who said life was easy or predictable?
Over the course of the last month I have done a whole lot of soul searching. I guess it's only natural when your a part of your job is care for souls and that job ends against your desires. The first realization I came to was that God's ways are an ever evolving and deepening mystery which I will never fully understand until He himself reveals it to me. The second thing I discovered is that I would have it no other way.
I had been growing increasingly more displeased with my position over the past several months but took comfort in knowing that God had me where He wanted me. My students we're growing both spiritually and personally. We were experiencing numerical growth as well. The ministry was good and thriving. God was present and at work in our ministries, unfortunately the Pastor and other members of the church leadership were not.
So I found myself suddenly without my job but with a huge weight lifted from my shoulders.
In the days that followed I came to my third realization. I found the true secret to life, or more accurately I was reminded of it. It's the reason I was so successful in my job and it's the reason I lost it. PASSION!
Whatever you do pour your whole self into it, no half hearting it. As the old cliché goes, anything worth doing is worth doing well, but it's more than that. It's the missing element in so many people’s lives and faith walks.

In our busy lives it's so easy to just phone it in, to just go along with the crowd to flow with the motion. That's been God's most consistent complaint against man since Adam first looked upon Eve. We like to live our lives without complication even if that complication is getting off our lazy rear ends and spending time actually working on our relationships, especially our relationship with God.

It's crazy if you think about it. Everything we have, everything we are, we owe to God. When we first recognize this we are astounded and awed and we fall on our knees and praise God and promise our lives to Him. For a time we live full out for Him and life is great, full of joy, full of meaning, full of life. But as time goes on we forget that sense of gratitude and start letting other things stand in between us and God. We begin justifying missing our daily quiet time, or prayers become shorter and shorter and more and more self centered. Sound familiar?

It's nuts, and yet we are all guilty of it, and not just in our spiritual lives, but in our work, our play, our friendships and even our marriages. That "new car smell" fades and we become complacent and lazy.

So are you tired of just phoning it in? Then stop! To paraphrase Popeye, you are who you are, so be who you be! Give all you are to all you do. How, you ask? Good question, I'm not sure I have the full answer yet, but I'm not going to rest until I do. Stay tuned, join me again in the Back Pew, I'll share my thoughts and heart with you and together we'll find the answer to this and other mysteries as we devote our lives to living fully for GOd and he opens our eyes to wonders anew.

Till then...

- Roman