It would be impossible for me to start at any other place than passion.  All of us were created with the potential to live out of a place of passion. I believe that God gives us the desires of our hearts and he gives us the desire which he put in our hearts in the first place. The challenge is to discover it. So many of us are raised in homes with an absence of love and therefore we find ourselves performing for love rather than from the discovery of what we love. Our families are meant to be the God conscious incubators in which we discover what we love. Mothers and fathers who know who they are, why they are here and where they are going will raise children to know and do the same. But that is rare or absent and typically is modelled by some form of fear of harm or absence of love and so most of us learn to perform to gain attention or avoid punishment.

Rediscovering Gods original plan for each of us begins with passion, with the simply question what do I love. But the reality is that it is not the simplest of questions, often far from it and yet it may be the most powerful question we can ever ask or be asked. Knowing what we love will unlock your passion, not just for you but for others, for the degree to which we know what we love will affect how much we love ourselves and therefore how much we can love our neighbours as ourselves.

I often imagine that each of us humans has been given a little piece of Gods heart. It is unique to us, a love fingerprint. It is our assignment to discover what we love and as we do we will reveal that piece of God placed in us to reveal him. Imagine one of those mosaic computer programs where you load 1000’s of photographs and the software program reorders them and creates a mosaic of the Mona Lisa or some other recognizable image. I imagine that God is the final mosaic and that each of us are the individual photographs taking our place in the portrait of God created for the world to see. We are to discover and display the unique piece of his heart which he trusted us with and to put it on display so that the world can see his expression through us.

I will never forget my first grandson proudly tell me at about 30 months old that his favorite colors were blue and green. How did he know I thought, who told him? But the truth was that he was given a choice from birth of colours, he had begun to choose and select and in a short period of time had decided on his favourites. You may start with something as apparently simple as color but the journey of discovery will be worth it.

If you are serious about this then here is an assignment for you:

1.Buy a journal, cheap or expensive, depending on what you love.

2.Over a 28 day period just take a note of things which you love. Get outside of church and work and in day to day life ask yourself what you love.

3.Start with inanimate things. Tastes, smells, colors, food and drink.

4.Then move on to what you love to do.

5. And finally what results from your activity do you love.

As you do this join the Psalmist who said: “dwell in the constant awareness of your presence and there behold what is beautiful to you and to me.” (my paraphrase)

I am praying that you will enjoy this assignment of passion on the way to your discovery of Purpose.