Passions and Expectations

What are you passionate about?  What gets you excited about life and the day.
We all have passions things that we just really love about life.  But what are we doing with theses passions?  How are we using them to shape and influence people around us?  I know, I know you are only in middle school, and who really expects you to shape and influence anyone.  What good is it to have a passion about something if you don’t do anything with it.  Your passion and the things that you are good at lead you to be a part of life.  Think about the things that you are really passionate about.  Go deeper than a t.v. show, or a video game.  Dig deep and think about your passions.  We can spend hours talking and arguing about things that really don’t matter.  These things can sometime consume us and we miss out on sharing and living out our real passion.  I have heard people have lengthly conversations about t.v. shows or sport teams and sometimes the more and more that they talk I just want to scream.  I listen and to be honest I act interested, but in the end I just want to scream who cares!  What I want to know about and talk about is what are you really passionate about!  What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.  What makes you feel alive and a part of the human race.  I can be a driven person, but we are all driven, it really comes down to the point of expectations what do you expect from you, and your passions.  In the Bible Paul had a friend who he was mentoring and raising up to be a leader.  Paul encouraged him in this verse   
1 Timothy 4:12  12 Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.
Paul is encouraging his friend to live out the passion that is in him to be all that he could be.  Now Timothy was not as young as you, but does that really matter?  What expectations do you have for yourself?  Do you believe that you can make a difference?  Do you believe that your passion can make a difference?  Our expectation of what we have to offer the world around us is key!  You can make a difference when you believe in you passion!  You can see people effected by you and all that you do.  You simply have to believe in your passion and act on it.  Lets face it the world looks at you and they only see teenagers and kids.  They don’t have great expectations for you, they want you to do well in school and in  sports, but they see their expectations paying off in the future.  So what are you going to do?  How are you going to follow your passions and allow your passions to impact people around you?  Start dreaming today and rise up and live the life you were meant to live.  Write the best story that your life could ever imagine. 


 

 

Discovering...
Your interest, your loves and passions.

What do you love?  I mean really love?  How long do you have to think… We love everything these days or at least we say that we love everything.  Think about it how many times in a day do you say that you love something. “I love that song, I love that drink, I just love that t.v. show, I love it when that happens and I just love him or her.  We are a culture who loves everything all the time.  Sounds good right, we are a loving people who love everything.  But what is really happening here?  How can we love everything?  How can we use the word that defines the ultimate emotion for everything.  How many of us would say I love my phone, I love my iPod?  What has happened to the word love, and what has it done to us as a culture that we really don’t have a word that truly defines the ultimate emotion that a human can feel or express.  Lets take a look at it this way, when you think about what you are interested in do you use the word love?  I love to play this or that sport?  I love that song, I love that movie.  What separates and gives value to the things in our life?  We all have interest and we all have things that we long to do with our time here on the planet but what drives them and what gives them meaning.  Can something have meaning just because we attach the word love to it or has love as a word and a definition lost it power to have meaning.  I mean which do you love the most your phone or your parents?  You think that’s easy but if you say you love both, then how can you know or the people around you know.  We need to think about what drives us to love so many things, because love is a serious word and we need to reclaim it, so that we have a measure of value to live our lives by.  What do I mean?  Think about this, what helps you determine your interest? What leads you to spend your time where you spend it?  The bible has this to say about interest and passions. In Psalms 37:3-6 3 Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
4 Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. 5 Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this:
6 He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. When we live life out of God and all that He finds pleasing we find the true meaning of life and our lives are full and complete.  That is what we are all looking for, but so few of us every find.  So we see that God longs for us to trust Him and stand by Him.  To Love Him and give the word Love the full importance that it deserves.  When we do that when we make our base for our life our relationship with God everything changes.  We find that what we consider important the same things that God considers important.  We find that our life has the same values as the one who gave things value.  Your life is based on the definition of LOVE.  Why do so few find this meaning, this way of life?  I believe that so few find it because it is an all in sort of life.  You have to be all in and trust completely.  We don’t trust completely and we are rarely all in.  To find this life we need to make our relationship with God the foundation for all that we do.  That is hard to do in a world and culture that loves everything.  So I ask you this.  What do you really love.  I mean what would you die for?  Think about it.  

Discovering Who You Are
Sorting through multiple identities... 
Okay we talk a lot about identity, and there is good reason for that… Knowing ones identity is  well, sometimes hard.  Think back to when you were a little kid and your identity was totally wrapped up in your family.  Your parents were the known factor in your life.  People did not really know you, they knew your family and that is how they gave you identity.  For a few years that was cool.  But as you got older you started to fight, fight for your independence, and you fought for your identity.  You know longer just wanted to be known as your parents child, you wanted to be known for you and who you were become.  This is the way it is, we need to be known for who we are.  This is the start of multiple identities, we are known for who we are by the family we are apart of and we are known for who we want people to know us for.  Think about it family friends know you as one person and school friends know you as someone else.  We try new things and we seek to be accepted, when we try something new we either find approval or disapproval.  If we find approval then we will do it again and aging and it becomes part of our identity.  But is it who we really are?  As time goes by and we get older, we keep trying new things and we keep forming new parts to our identity depending on the group that we are with.  Before long we have many identities and many different groups that we run with.  This is the way that it is for many of us.  This is how we form us and over time it gets difficult to know who we really are.  This is not how it was supposed to be.  We are all given an identity, but we must look to the source to truly find out who we are.  Take a look at this verse. 1 John 3:1 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are.  If we go to the source, we find that we are to  be children of God, we are to look to God to find out who we are.  Identity is a source issue where we go to get identity determines what our identity will be.  We need to seek out the best possible source for our identity.  We have to know who God says we are.  It is a maze out there and the only way we will find our way through it is by getting the best possible direction that we could ever get.  Each day we choose who we will be, step by step minute by minute we all have multiple identities, and we need to live in the identity that comes from the best possible source, we need to live out or identity as children of God.

Discovering 
Who you are...

Who are you?  This is a question we have asked and asked so many times in XGT.  There is a good reason why we continually ask you to think about this question.  If you know who you are if you really know who you are, life will be what it is supposed to be.  You see we spend so much time looking and searching out who we are and what we are supposed to be.  That is okay because well you are in your teen years and we should start to hammer down who we are and what we are going to be in life.  We are writing our story and refining who we are.  But the problem is this where are we looking and searching to find these answers.  If I asked you to find me gold would you look for it in a silver mine?  If I asked you to pick me a fresh apple off of the tree, would you go to an orange tree?  Know you would go to the right place to find the item that you were in search of.  So why is it not that way when we seek out who we are?  Why is it not that way when we look for what our story is supposed to be?  I can tell you this much, the world and the controlling forces of the world do not want you to know who you really are.  They want you to stay confused and lost.  Why?  If you really learned who you are and what you are capable of then you will become a powerful force against evil.  So instead of doing battle with you it is easier to just keep you confused and scared.  You don’t really know who you are yet if you are not fighting evil and winning!  Simply put that is most of us.  We are looking to discover who we are and we are looking in all the wrong places…

Where is the right place to look?  Of course God, I mean He created you and set you apart!

He is the designer of your story.  But you are free to write it any way you want, but He longs for you to write it with Him so it will be everything that He hopes for you.  He hopes big things for you.  Check out Romans 8:15-16 to learn who you are. 15 For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. There you have it you are a child of God and God is your ultimate Father!  No place better than to go to your supreme father to find out who you are and what you were made for!  Dig in and stop being only a shadow of who you were made to be.