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Sunday, August 16, 2009
Passion
First in a Three Part Series – Living With the P’s
By Rev. Jerry Herships
Colossians 3:23
23 Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters
My fear is that this will come off sounding like a Tony Robbins seminar. I used to be a big fan of those self-help seminars. I never went to his seminars (I didn’t have the money and his teeth scared me) but I still liked how I felt after I left one of those seminars: Pumped up, motivated, ready to take on the world. The problem was it often faded. When I didn’t reach my goals I felt like a LOSER! And to make matters worse, usually people like Tony Robbins would make me feel that if his program didn’t work…it was MY FAULT. I wasn’t doing the program right. While this might be true, I always found it interesting that the solution to get me back on track…was one more seminar!
I am not going to tell you to take one more seminar. I am not going to tell you that you aren’t disciplined enough, and I am not going to ask you to buy my tapes. I am going to tell you what the Bible says about living your life with Passion.
One of the things that the church is big on with clergy is taking care of themselves. They use the fancy words, “self-care.” It is this idea that we do what we need to do to take care of ourselves. Eat right, exercise, devote time to spiritual development, that sort of thing. One of the big things they suggest is that when you are away from work, be away from it.
I think it was Zig Ziglar, who was Tony Robbins before Tony Robbins was born said it well, “when most sales people are at work, they think should be home with their family and when they are with their family, think they should be at work.” It is really hard to leave it completely. I think part of this is true but I also think it is harder to do than to say.
For many of us, work is our Mistress and I think when we like what we do, it is easy to blur the lines. Actor Warren Betty was asked to define success and he said, “You never know whether you are working or playing.”
If this is the definition of success, I know I worked at jobs that I wasn’t very successful in most of my life. The passage in Colossians tells us that even when we aren’t thrilled with the work we are doing, we need to focus on giving it to God as an offering. We need to do it with our whole heart, with passion. I RARELY did that as I worked jobs throughout my life. I KNEW when I was sorting break pads into 55 gallon drums in the back of an auto parts store in Detroit with an asbestos mask on…that I was working and not playing. When I was a busboy at a Coney Island hot dog joint, rinsing cigarettes and chili off the plates, I was working not playing. When I was 30 and folding jeans at the GAP, I was not playing. And I can honestly say, I don’t think I did one of those jobs and really “put myself into it.” And, that was a disservice to God.
We have two issues here. One, finding work you love and that you are passionate about and two, how to offer up the work you are doing when it might not be your dream gig. In both cases, this passage is telling us we need to do it as if our boss is God. I KNOW that this was so much harder to do when I hated my job. In fact when this letter from Paul was first written, it would have been heard by a number of people who were slaves. The message for them was that of letting your service be for the Lord who is master to all. This did not excuse the practice of slavery but was saying that regardless of circumstance, remember that our ultimate boss in God. As I said, it is so much easier to “work for God” when we love our job, so it seems to me we should all be trying to do that thing that we can do with passion and, as one translation puts it, “with all our heart.”
How do you find that? One way is when time flies by. I think when a person loses track of time doing a particular task, they need to look at that. What do you do that you are so passionate about that you don’t even notice the clock? Don’t discard that. I don’t believe that Jesus got up every day and went, “Oh man, there’s the buzzer. I don’t want to get up, AHHH; more preaching and healing and walking on water….please just 5 more minutes.” I think he jumped out of bed. I think he lived his life with passion.
I find myself on every day off saying, “Today, I will do absolutely nothing that has to do with Afterhours.” I couldn’t do that if I tried. I have tried. It is impossible. I am always thinking what can make it better. I’m thinking, “That would make a good quote,” or that song would work for a sermon I’ve got coming up. Or, what about champagne buckets instead of offertory baskets?” We are still trying to get trustees to approve that one.
We have to take time to recharge. Jesus did it all the time. You read about him going off alone to pray. But I think there is a difference between recharging and trying to forget. When I had lousy jobs that were Monday – Friday, I would start to get miserable by about Sunday noon because I knew Monday was right around the corner. That is NOT God’s plan for our lives.
A few weeks ago, we talked about John 10:10 where God wants us to have life and have it abundantly. Life is not supposed to be a drag. Change it. I am not saying to give up your day job tomorrow, however.
I am reading a great book called, Ignore Everybody: and 39 other keys to creativity. One of the chapters is, Don’t Quit Your day Job. What it says, and I agree whole heartedly, is to make sure you include your life’s passion a little bit everyday. You might have to get creative to do this. I love wine and men’s clothes but that doesn’t mean I should drink a bottle of wine every night and go shopping everyday. But I can read about wine or surf the blogs about men’s style and fashion. The key is to not completely edge it out of your life until maybe you can find a way to make it your life’s work.
God gave each of us unique things in a unique combination that no one else in the world has. I think our passion is buried somewhere deep inside. And I believe God wants us to find and use this passion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” Remember that we talked about enthusiasm before. It comes from the Greek meaning "inspired by or possessed by God". Last week we talked about God being within us. Our enthusiasm or passion is God possessing us.
The problem for many of us is that, in some ways, we have had those passions and enthusiasm beat out of us at a young age. Gordon MacKenzie, the guy who wrote the book I talked about last week, Orbiting the Giant Hairball, tells a story about when he goes to schools to teach art classes to elementary school kids. He teaches each grade separately. He teaches first graders in first period, second graders in second period and third graders in third period and so on. In each class he asks an interesting question. “Who else here is an artist?” In the first grade group, every hand goes up. Every child is an artist. In second grade about half the hands go up and in the third grade, 10 out of 30 hands go up. By the sixth grade, no more than 1 or 2 hands are raised and then, guardedly. Do not let this world crush your passions. THAT IS NOT PART OF GOD’S PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE.
This week, I wrote a friend, Barry Kooser, and asked him how he kept the world from knocking the artist out of him. Barry went to one of the best art schools in the country, got an internship with Disney Studio and while still in school, he got offered a job by Disney animation. When he got out of school, he went on to work on Brother Bear, Lelo & Stich, Mulan, and Lion King. He then left to go out and be a full time landscape artist whose works are shown in some of the best galleries in the country including Carmel and Palm Desert, CA and Scottsdale, AZ. His art hangs in some of the nicest homes in the country.
He told me he was lucky because other people in his family were artistically inclined and encouraged him and didn’t shut him down. He also said the same thing about schools regarding sucking the creativity out of kids at a young age. I think there are always exceptions, but sadly I think we have to cultivate that small voice inside us, the school and others aren’t going to do it for us.
And as I have said before, I think that still, small voice, is God. I think God knows how much easier it will be for us to work with passion and offer it up to God when we truly see it as a work of art for God. That doesn’t just go for the job that we are getting paid for but for our whole life as well. Live it with passion and in such a way that you can offer it up to God and say, “Look what I did!”
Gordon MacKenzie’s book ends with his beliefs about what happens when you were born. He says God asks one last thing before you are launched into the world. God says, “Do me a favor. Would you take this artist’s canvas with you and paint a masterpiece for me? I’d really appreciate that.”
Go out and paint God a masterpiece of your life. Work from the heart, and offer it to God.