Years ago, I talked with one of my mentors, an old pastor who had been around the block several times. I had given him a copy of my new goals for the year. I was around 50 years old, so I had 50 goals. When he finished reading them, he asked me which one was my passion for the year. I replied that I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure what he meant. He said that I ought to have one passion every year, the most important goal of all my goals that I thought about constantly, that was life-transforming and would take a lot of focus and diligence to accomplish. So every year I decide what my one passion will be. It is never hard to decide and is usually very obvious to me and others. Often, my one passion continues from the previous year. This year, my passion is to have 100 people attending Jefferson Evangelical Church by the end of the year. I say my goal, but it is really the goal of the whole church. I have 14 other ministry goals concerning the church, all designed to contribute to that one big goal, my passion. The biggest problem in my life now is a lack of energy and motivation. It wasn’t that many years ago that I was a ball of fire, always looking for new things to do and accomplish. Now I feel like a slug, content with accomplishing very little. My greatest tool in fighting the anchor of getting older and running out of gas is the passion that I choose to focus on. A few years ago, I didn’t need to light a fire in myself. Now I do. The cool thing is I still can and I know how to do it. The fire used to come from the inside; now it comes from the outside. The problem I had in the past was that I was always trying to accomplish too much, but now I focus on a few things, and I am careful about what I choose as my passion. I want it to be God’s will for my life; then I get His strength and wisdom in accomplishing it. I will be 78 years old soon, so I figure that I have about 12 years left to do ministry, and I expect that my one passion will stay the same, except the number will keep going up.