Passion and Purity: Lesson One

 

Over the past few days, I have been reading a book that my youth pastor had handed out in February. The sermons that month had been based off a book. I know what you are thinking… its August…the sermon was in February and you are just now reading the book.

In my defense:

1.) Someone introduced me to a book called the Hunger Games

2.) Couldn’t get a copy of The Hunger Games and was scared to start a new book.

3.) Finally got a copy, read it in four days… then I needed the next book…

4.) Couldn’t get a copy of Catching Fire… was scared to start a new book again!

5.) Lastly, I had started the book before hand got to the seventh chapter and lost it… but by then someone told me about The Hunger Games and my quest for the famous book began…

Anyways, the book that I’m reading is Passion and Purity, by Elizabeth Elliot. Over these next few blog posts, I’m probably going to talk about it because it has left a huge impression on me… and I’m not even half way through the book.

This book is about… well… here’s the back of it.

“In Passion and Purity, Elizabeth Elliot emphasizes the need to commit daily to Christ all matters of the heart and to wait upon Him. She teaches his often painful yet rewarding discipline by candidly tracing her love story with Jim Elliot as evidence that she has been there.

Through letters, diary entries and memories, she shares the temptations, difficulties, victories and sacrifices of two young people whose commitment to Christ took priority over their love for each other. These revealing personal glimpses, combined with relevant biblical teaching, will remind you that only by putting your human passion and desire through His fire can God purify your love.

Passion and Purity gives honest direction in such areas as:

1.) Loving passionately while remaining sexually pure

2.) Whether or not to marry and who is the right one

3.) The man’s and woman’s role in relationships

4.) Putting God’s desires ahead of personal desires

5.) How far is too far physically”

Now that you rather understand what the book is about, I have to tell you what came to my attention today… First, I have to tell you all of the events that lead up to that point. First my mother tried to wake me up at five in the morning for school. She told me not to fall back asleep, I told her I wouldn’t but I confess. I lied. I fell back asleep and woke up at six instead. Not that bad of damage, I didn’t need to take a shower so I still had forty-five minutes before the bus got here… Yes… do the math. My bus get’s here at about 6:45 in the morning. Lucky me!

Now I’m not a morning person. In fact, if you make me mad in the morning you might want to go running in the other direction. But I got up, made some coffee (it’s what I’m living on now!) and you know did the usual, brushed my teeth, read a chapter or two of Psalms, remembered that it was spirit day so I could actually wear Jeans! (I go to a career tech school and they are hard-core on uniforms!) So I wore my jeans, poured my coffee, and at about 6:30-ish, my brother wakes up reminding me that he thinks he needs my iPod for the day.

Yeah Right.

So I try to use an old iPod that my aunt gave my sister… it wouldn’t connect to the computer. As I’m trying to synchronize, the iPod that isn’t even being recognized by the computer, the bus passes and I go running out!

Now you would think that with about forty-five minutes on the bus in the morning, I would be able to sleep… Nope. For some reason I can’t sleep on the bus in the morning. Therefore, I listen to my daily Dose of Wretched (a podcast that is free!). Once I’m done with the fifteen-minute podcast, I pull out my book, Passion and Purity. I finally got to the part where Jim confesses his love for her and I couldn’t help but smile. I love that part of the story, although there is a catch. He believed at that point that God was calling him to be single. Now at…about seven in the morning I’m in no mood for that kind of disappointment… but I kept reading. Surely, there was a reason I’m reading this so early in the morning. Surely, there is a reason I can’t sleep… and there was.

I get to chapter twelve: holding pattern. It begins with this paragraph:

“I began to learn to wait. Patient waiting does not come naturally to most of us,” that’s me! “But a great deal is said about it in the Bible. It is an important discipline for anyone who wants to learn to trust.” That entire passage stuck out to me like a sore thumb. I am defiantly not a patient woman… and from reading Elizabeth’s’thoughts during her senior year in college… she wasn’t that patient either. In matter of a fact, I just want things to happen here and now. I want to go to college and fall desperately in love, I want start my career, get married and have kids! However, like Elizabeth… I have to wait. Besides, I’m only in high school.

The other thing that stuck out to me was the last part, “it is important discipline for anyone who wants to learn to trust.”The more I think about it, the more I know it’s true. What else is more effecting in teaching you to trust than waiting on something you can’t see to let you be able to give into your desires to abandon everything and fall in love? I can’t think of anything else… you have to have a lot of trust in God to be able to do that.

That really hit me. Mostly because I don’t trust many people, usually people have to do a lot to earn my trust, and I just don’t tell people things or do crazy things with them. So the fact that I’m waiting on God when I’m not patient, and I have to trust that His will is what is best for me is something huge when they coincide with each other.

Lesson One: Patience in God is a great way to learn how to trust.