What moves you?

There's a lot to be excited about this spring at CFA. With Camp Ruff'n It looking to bring a whole herd more dogs to camp, a never-before-seen trail run 5K to test Texas runners on our gorgeous rocky terrain, and dozens of groups who are coming to camp for the first, second, third, or maybe even tenth time. Sharing camp with people is what jazzes us up and drives us to keep working sometimes ridiculous hours.

When the Youth Empowerment Retreat group was here, we talked a lot about identifying your personal passion— the force that makes you want to work on something all night, not because it's overdue, but because it gets you excited. For some people, it was working with animals. For other people, it was sports or music. There was at least a third of the room, though, who really couldn't tell what their passion was.. at least, they knew what they enjoyed, but they couldn't imagine it consuming their life.

Terri Guillemets said, "Chase down your passion like it's the last bus of the night." Sounds like some super famous author or philosopher, right? Wrong. Terri is a seemingly quite average human being who has a deep love of famous and insightful quotations and the written word. Pretty much on her own, she has built and maintained www.QuoteGarden.com, one of the most-frequented websites on the net, though not because of its flashiness (in fact, the site is pretty early-2000s outdated) or extreme content. (Most of the "contributors" of the quotations are dead; they're historical figures or famous people from years gone by.) She didn't build the site to pocket money; she built it because she loved the subject enough to share it with people. That's passion.

I hope next time you're at camp, you get a chance to act on something that really drives you. It might be a sport or activity (hey, you guys all know how much I dig horseback riding— I've made that hobby into a career!) or it could be a service project or some kind of leadership you show at camp. (What about being a Raggers counselor?) What about that thing lights you up inside? Can you take that from an interest to a passion— can you do something with it?