Leading up to Easter, my family watched The Bible miniseries. Two hours at a go, with stories that I have heard all of my life, with children who don’t often have the attention span to sit through two hours of anything that doesn’t involve music, animated characters or slapstick humor.

There’s a recipe for good old fashioned family fun.

Still, we watched.

We covered little eyes as swords were drawn, we paused to explain stories to our children, we all tried to guess what stories would be included next, what might be left out.

What began as me watching with my children out of a sense of, well, it’s the Bible, it’s important – became me, falling in love all over again with a remarkable author.

How amazing is this book?

And how important is this story, to everyone?

Then, life happens again. Easter Sunday (yay!) and we all eat candy and dress nicely and spend the afternoon feasting and hunting for plastic trinkets.

And then, it’s Wednesday morning and I’m listening to my dishwasher churn and the sounds of Scooby Doo entertaining Asher in the living room, my work space cluttered with contracts and client work to mail and images to finish editing, a women’s devotional Bible that I am incredibly lazy with – I am suddenly struck by just how very little passion with which I live.

I mean, I am passionate. But I am not, drop everything and follow me passionate. Am I? Are any of us anymore, really?

Compared to the passion of the disciples,  how they lived in the years following Christ, I am pretty sure I am lackluster at best. These men and women who were filled with the Holy Spirit, they could not be kept silent. They weren’t killed for angering people with their finger pointing and their outing of non-Christian’s sins – they were killed for spreading the Gospel truth, which is not condemnation, but freedom.

Can we even just imagine for one minute what it would look like if all of us who claim to be Christians actually lived this out for one day – or even one single hour. What if we lived as though the Gospel message was actually so important that we needed to share it.

We would be literally bursting from the inside out, desperate to tell the person in front of us in line at Starbucks that they are loved and that there is freedom from all that binds them on this earth, if they only believe.

That’s the sort of passion that I want. I would rather be that crazy lady who keeps telling me that God loves me, than the friendly-enough person who posts witty things or takes pretty pictures, but is otherwise an empty vessel.

And yet, what is most astounding of all, is that even when I am that quiet, lackluster person, when we are not everything we ought to be, when we are not tapping on strangers shoulders or speaking the Gospel to our neighbors, the miracle is that our faith through Christ is enough.

God saves the weak, the drunk, the adulterers, and throughout the history of the Bible, he used every willing heart (even the weak, the drunk, the adulterers.)

Everything unclean made clean. Everything old made new.

Where I fail, where I am weak, where I am broken – this is where I am triumphant, strengthened, saved. And it has nothing to do with me at all.

I do not need to be the smartest, the wittiest, the bravest. I do not need to wear a t-shirt with Philippians 4:13 on it to tell the world I have faith, I simply need to live it.

T-shirts and memes and tracts, they are all fine and can be useful, but what could be more powerful than a truly passionate person, only speaking the truth. You are loved and you can let go of everything that hurts and binds and burdens.

No records of rights and wrongs, no politicizing everything, just faith expressing itself through love. 

Jesus spoke love, not politics. And, when he did speak politics, it was in response to the those attempting to trick him, goading him into saying the wrong thing, willing him to cause division.

Where politics are division, Jesus is unity.

Where I fail, where I say the wrong thing or say nothing at all, He still triumphs.

Even crazier? The passion He has, for all of us.

If that isn’t enough to get you out of the boat, out of the mundane blahs of this life, I don’t know what will.