GREATEST PASSION IN LIFE

What is your single greatest passion in life? This is a question that is often thrown around in interviews and in general conversation. What employers or college recruiters wish to hear may not be anywhere close to what you really are. For instance it is attractive to say, “I want to make a difference in the world around me” or “I am passionate about animals or painting,—” and so on. To critique these answers, when does making a difference become substantial for you? Is it when you parent a single child with love and discipline and teach him values and skills or is it only when you hold a significant position in a company or through politics, to influence a larger community of people? It doesn’t take long to realize that most answers we give to this question are about things we do rather than who we are.

Your greatest passion in life should define you as a person. Perhaps making money is what drives a person. Drawing from the money mad world around us and from the allure of cash, man could easily make it the most important quest in his life. It could be alternatively be a close cousin- handling power. Power is addictive and not only satisfies the inner ego of man but also becomes very convenient to order circumstances around you with little regard to others around, to ensure that you are preserved. Raising children is a common theme for many, as it provides you the next best thing to immortality- that of preserving your imparted nature through someone else and ensuring that you live on. Hedonism, pursuing knowledge, travel, serving others, striving for social justice and so on are some of the many pursuits in life that define people at their very core.

First it is important to ask ourselves, ‘Who am I really?’ And truthfully answering that question is critical to assess where we stand in life and how satisfied we will be as we finish our life here on earth. In general, man will accomplish what he sets his mind to. At least to some measure, man’s ingenuity and will to succeed will help him to live out his greatest passion in life. Whether it will help him be satisfied is another question though. Unless his greatest passion moors him to some extent in the eternal, beyond the temporariness of life, he will remain unsatisfied. And without a doubt, no other quest can bring as much satisfaction and meaning as the passion to know God and live for Him.

Finally it is also true that man can change his greatest passion. He goes from one to the other only when he realizes that the latter bestows upon him a value that far exceeds the former. In Paul’s words,

“—–I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.—–” (Philippians 3:8).

Not only does he explicitly state that finding Christ is like finding a treasure that exceeds all else, he also tells us what truly defines a supreme passion in man’s life. It is one for whose sake man will readily give up all else. Compared to painting or advocating for animals, which are no more than hobbies for most, man’s greatest passion will survive through trial, no matter what the cost.

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