You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Not just love. LOVE!
If you are a human, you are a born fanatic. Please listen to this very carefully: you were designed to be obsessed with something. Somewhere in the core of your being there is a place where everything within you is supposed to come together in one, mighty, unified focus of love. Until we find this love, we spend our lives wandering through the world as if we don’t know quite what we are here for.
We take little pieces of our heart and try to give them away to a whole harem of loves. Some of this love we give to food, some to sex, some to sports, some to money, and some to ambition. Some people somehow understand that we are not supposed to break this great capacity to love into little pieces and spread them all around, and so they focus everything they have on one thing. When that one thing is not God, tragedy results. This kind of person will probably end up addicted to alcohol, drugs, sex, or food. We look at such people with pity and yet I wonder if they are not closer to the truth than we are in some ways.
At least they understand that all of life is supposed to be controlled by one, overpowering, master passion.
2 comments:
Well said. Here's an extension of that idea. Moderation, which is so often held up as a great value and goal of good society, is antithetical to the true religion of God. We are all hard-wired toward addiction. And if we can get our addiction focused on LOVE!, it will surely result in ACTION! -- extreme ACTION!
In this regard, the terrorists have a leg up on us. They have focused their addiction well enough; they just have the wrong target. Their god is not the God of LOVE!, but the god of HATE!. And their ACTION! follows suit.
Because these passionate evil-doers have rocked the world over and over throughout the ages, society has come to the false conclusion that passionate extremism is itself the evil to be avoided. Moderation in all things, etc. LOVE! (or rather Love) is all well and good... as long as it is in moderation.
But the LOVE! that motivated Jesus to the cross is no moderation. In the same way, we are not wired for moderation, yet spend most of our lives trying to avoid extremes.
I like the comparison to the terrorists. In my youth, the comparison would have been to committed communists. The whole Laodician thing comes to mind. "Because you are neither hot not cold, I will spit you out of my mouth?
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