One of the things I believe is so common today is the belief that life will just happen to me, for me. By that I mean that I get the opportunity to sit back and enjoy life with minimal effort and everything will happen to my benefit in my life without me having to do anything. Now, that is a extreme way of stating it, and I am sure most people would inherently disagree with me, but then again, how often do you organize your life with a plan in mind? How often have you thought about who you want to be and have established goals that you are working towards? Let me put this a slightly different way. Right now, do you have simple goals that you are working towards or are you living passively without either a purpose or a plan? I am not the type of guy that has a 10 year plan or even a 5 year plan. I have had an idea of what I wanted to do in life and have tried to take steps towards that direction, but I have always felt God's hand leading elsewhere. I am glad I have not had such a strict plan for my life because I have had opportunities to step out and do things I otherwise would never have wanted to do or either would not have been able to do. However, I have still lived with some sort of goal, desire, or pursuit.
Here is my belief, or at least my opinion: God has given us wisdom. He does guide us and bring us opportunities. He has also put dreams and passions and abilities inside of us that He expects us to unwrap and then proceed to use and develop. He will not do that for us. He expects us to steward our lives with what He has placed within us (think the parable of the talents in Matthew 25). Ultimately, if we live passively never pursuing any dream or desire or never pursuing goals to grow and develop who we are we will never reach our full potential or we will miss opportunities because we lived passively never pursuing ways we could develop what God has given us. For example, if it has been dream to write and you aren't finding ways to write or taking classes to help refine and develop that as a skill then are you really stewarding what God has given you.
There is a fine line to thinking we have to do it all ourselves or believe God will do it all for us. I don't want to make it sound like it is all up to us to make ourselves who we need to be. However, I do believe that part of the reason we see so many passionless, passive christians today is because we have never connected with the passionate God who has Himself placed passions within us to pursue. We have sometimes felt that passion can be a negative thing and we need to calm down, be rational, use wisdom, either set up a 10 year plan so you know where You are going (with no room for God to interrupt) or don't worry about it God has everything under control and He will do it (because He definitely never uses people to accomplish His plan). Well try holding that argument up against the life of either Jesus or Paul, who were both very passionate people who lived very single-minded, very much pursuing the passions in their own hearts which were in fact God given. It says of Jesus specifically that He grew in wisdom, in stature, and in favor with God and man. He did it. That doesn't sound very passive to me. it doesn't say God did it for Him.
Those are my thoughts behind why I think it is so important to live intentionally. I think it is so powerful, not to mention fun, when we begin connecting with what God has placed inside of us, no matter how seemingly childish it is, for the intention of growing with Him, coming to know Him and ourselves better, and connecting with the passions and desires internally in order that we can grow, mature and develop into the people we are created to be. It can be as simple as reading a book a month to learning how to sword fight with a Katana (for a friend, not me), simply because it connects us with who we are. If done with the Lord and allowing HIm to lead, change, reorganize those things it can be a wonderful journey of discovering how He created us and what He thinks of us and pushes us to live pro-actively in a passive, reactive culture, which will never honestly accomplish anything
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