My life has been full of different passions. My first passion was baseball. We didn’t have organized leagues at first, we played in sandlots.I lived, slept, drank, and ate baseball. There was no T-ball back then. You had to learn to hit the ball and then the gloves were smaller so catching was more difficult. With thick-lenses glasses bouncing on my face I chased down fly balls in the outfield or anywhere else I could play. I played every position.

That lasted for 7 years until playing trumpet came along. I played up to 6 hours a day, every chance I got and even got a college degree in it. In the midst of the trumpet passion, God got ahold of my life and directed me into the ministry where I began my passion for Him.

Balancing passions has always been a challenge. We may have a passion for God, a passion for our family and maybe something else. Sometimes it seems that one passion pushes another passion out of the way. That may or may not be good.

Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God”(Matt. 6:33) and all that other stuff will be okay. My passion today is still living for God. But what do you do when it seems that God is so far but your desire is so strong for God? It seems that He is playing “Hide and seek” with you. In a sense He is. This is God’s way of drawing you deeper into Him. “How bad do you want it?” Often we think that we can draw closer to God by reading a chapter in the Bible everyday and praying ten minutes.

A ten minute devotional everyday is a good start and as a new Christian years ago, God blessed my new found relationship with Him. There comes a time when He prompts you to go deeper. No more quick answers because He wants to commune with you. “How bad do you want it?” We should understand this principle of passion. When you first start playing a sport, improvement comes rapidly, but there comes a time when it takes more practice to improve. It is the same way in building a relationship with God. It takes time and commitment. Ten minutes a day only works for so long.

Ruth Hayley Barton has written a number of books describing ways to go deeper in God. In “Sacred Rhythms” she writes about the disciple of “Solitude” saying, “The longing for solitude is the longing for God. It is the longing to experience union with God unmediated by the way we typically try to relate to God.By ‘unmediated’ I mean a direct experience of God with nothing in between…”Intimacy with God. That is my goal for this year. The “Depth of my desire”is deep. “How bad do you want it?” Pastor Bob