What Should a Pastor's Primary Passion Be? Joe McKeever joemckeever.com A 10-year-old girl said something that has had me thinking about passion ever since. That word “passion” gives us compassion, passive, dispassionate, and a host of related concepts. At its core, from the Latin, “passion” means “to suffer.” Its opposite, passive, or impassive, means “unfeeling.” I was teaching cartooning to children in the afternoons following vacation Bible school. At one point, I had to take a phone call and turned the class over to my teenage granddaughter who was assisting me. Ten minutes later, I told the children about the call.