Bringing the "Awesome" to Anything

Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.



In this conversation, Mike Rowe speaks against this common idea of “following your passion.” I think Mike might say this idea falls squarely in the realm of the less mature, pre-conventional wisdom. He suggests passion is not something you follow, but instead something you bring with you.

One of the things we are intentionally working on at Impact Campus Ministries is the art of sacred vocation. We have a fundamental belief that all work is holy and sacred. There is a sanctity to a vocation that is often overlooked. Why is vocation holy and sacred? Because vocation is, in its essence, about the proper ordering and stewarding of God’s creation. For centuries, Christian theology has unintentionally (I hope) pulled apart soil and spirit, giving the impression that the “Kingdom work” is done by clergy and missionaries, while the rest of the parishioners essentially make money to help the real work happen. They rub shoulders with the unsaved at their places of employment. They bring the money and “the lost” to the conversation and the holy folks do the spiritual work.

But this is not grounded in good theology. God is putting the whole world back together, bringing shalom to the physical chaos of creation. What this means is that the real work is done by those people who have their hands in the soil (literally or otherwise). It is the job of the clergy to help others see why their work matters. The non-clergy folks are actually engaging in the ends and not the means to that end. It’s all holy and spiritual work, but the clergy are engaging in the means to the Kingdom end — we usually have it backward!

This is so important in the conversation Rowe begins above, and yet one of the hardest ideas to grasp is where the passion lies. For many, the conversation about sacred vocation revolves around the idea that they must find the perfect vocation where their true passion lies.

But as Rowe points out, this is backward thinking.

Passion does not lie in the content of the vocation; passion describes the way we engage vocation in the first place. I think some of us go through life looking for the thing in our future that will give us passion when that passion is already within us and would transform the way we engage with our present.

One of the values at ICM is passion. We use this word to talk about the energy we bring to our pursuit of God. In this case, it is fitting that Rowe’s point is we bring passion to our work. In the same way passion describes the energy we bring to our pursuit of God, passion also describes the energy we bring to our vocation.

We have all met people who remind us of Les (from Mike’s video). They aren’t driven by their circumstances but bring a passion that affects the circumstances around them. It might be a grocer who always makes you feel better by the time you are checked out. I once heard a speaker talk about the parking lot attendant at a local establishment; living in a major urban city, he will drive past two other stores of the same franchise just to interact with this parking lot attendant. Why? Because they bring passion to their job, and their job becomes a sacred kind of “holy.”

Some of these people have jobs that would impress us — jobs of influence and intense specialization and high salaries.

And yet, some of these people work incredibly menial jobs and have a similar impact on the world around them.

It is true we have been created with certain gifts and are wired to be good at particular things. It is true some jobs align with those gifts better than others and that some situations are suffocating and stifling the life that burns within us. But we are not created for a particular career. We are created to be a particular kind of person. Our careers are simply the place where we can let those things grow.