Divine Plagiarism

We all know the story of the Starving Artist. The guy just trying to scrape by until he gets his big break, all the while his parents asking when he is going to grow up and become an accountant. There is something in us that admires the girl who throws everything away to chase her dream. The childlike heart of the dreamer reaches the younger parts of our own hearts. But dreams are never free, and their costs are often assessed against those in relationship with the dreamers.

John Boyd was a legendary fighter pilot, a man who shaped the world’s most powerful Air Force. He even has a building of the Fighter Weapons School named after him. Yet in pursuing his dream, he neglected his family. In the final accounting, his children resented him, and his marriage was a mess. B.F. Skinner, the renowned behavioral scientist, unleashed his dreams directly upon his family with horrific results. These are the successes, the ones who got their big break. Too often, the man who burns with passion will singe those closest to him. Passion must be tempered by something greater than itself.

The Greek philosophers saw passion as an impurity of the soul, a remnant of the animalistic drives within us. They despised it just as they despised the flesh. The Scriptures do not give us this option. King David dances in the streets before the Lord. The prophets tell of their consuming zeal for the Temple of God. Jesus Christ embodies that zeal, overturning tables and driving merchants from the Court of the Gentiles. So passion is a driving thing. It is as different for each of us as we are different from each other. And though it requires God’s discipline to keep it from running wild, passion is a gift of the Creator.

But like any other gift, passion is not license. It does not exempt you from your responsibilities. Nor from the consequences for your actions. There is something inspiring about the struggling guitarist crammed in with the other band members in the tour van, eating a three A.M. dinner at Waffle House after the show. (Superpowers by Five Iron Frenzy. Back in the day. Oh yeah.) There is nothing inspiring about the trust fund baby getting his fifth degree in performing arts because he doesn’t feel like leaving college. Even less inspiring (less than nothing is pretty bad) is the man who leaves his family to find ‘true love’ with a woman who is not his wife. In the name of ‘throwing it all away for love,’ men have abandoned the laws of God and of man. There is no glory in this, for these men only pursue the love of self.

Here we see the difference between passion as license and passion as service. Passion as license takes what rightfully belongs to others in the name of its self-centered dreams. It is the child of pride, and pride makes its demands immediately and constantly. Pride grasps, greedily closing its hands around dreams. Love holds dreams with an open hand before the Dreamgiver, trusting that He does not plant desire in vain. Passion as service is the daughter of love, and love is patient. She gives itself to others, first paying debts rightfully owed, then blessing others in the overflow. She counts the cost, and is content to wait if the price is too high right now.

Count the cost of your dreams. Not just the cost of getting there. The cost of being there. My dad told me once that over the lifetime of a car, the dealership makes more money on repairs than on the initial sale. Perhaps, in this regard, dreams have something in common with cars. We focus so much on getting there that we don’t really think much about what we’ll do once were there. Of course, you can’t really sort out repair costs until you are sure you can actually afford the car, and this is true with dreams as well. There really are very few NFL players, world class artists, neurosurgeons, astronauts, Broadway stars, or successful screenwriters, especially considering the pool of aspirants. You have to run the numbers with a sober eye to your gifts. If you’re six foot three, you probably won’t ever be the winning jockey in the Kentucky Derby. (You never know, though.) So you look at your chances, you consign yourself to eating Ramen for a while, and you take your shot. Say it works out. Now what?

We find ourselves at the intersection of passion and purpose when our dreams actually pan out. Yet the very mechanics of passion ensure that we cannot simply put down a lawn chair and camp out in that place. In the space between dreams and fulfillment, there is often an expectation of arrival; we think that when we get our big break, we’ll have finally have made it. We think that at some point we’ll be able to coast for a while. Passion just doesn’t work that way. Excellence happens once in a while when you pursue your passions for fun. If you’re lucky, it will happen when the right person is looking. Say that person gives you your dream shot, say he pays you to do what you love. He hired you because he saw excellence in you. Therefore, his expectation is excellence, and this is what he pays you for. The excellence you once celebrated is now demanded from you.

My friend R. is a fighter pilot. He flies one of the world’s most advanced aircraft in one of the world’s premier combat wings. By any objective measure, less than a thousand people worldwide could claim to have comparable aeronautical skills and training. (I really hate doing anything to further inflate fighter guys’ egos. I’m making an important point, though. Bear with me.) Really, a lot of luck and hard work came together to get him where he is. For the weekend flyer, flying is always fun. You shoot an excellent approach in a Cessna, and you feel good about it. If our weekend flyer scored a ride in my friends’ fighter, he would have an awesome time and would surely be telling his friends all about it for some time to come. So naturally, the weekend flyer expects that my friend’s life is one incredible day of aviation joy after another. Really, though, my friend’s life consists of 4 A.M. showtimes, constant studying, tedious five hour briefs, brutal two hour debriefs, continuous critiques, and the never-ending expectation to perform at a world-class level. He is always under demands to demonstrate his right to be counted as a fighter pilot. And you never really arrive. There is always another upgrade, another school, another qual you need to get. I imagine that it is little different for a world-class athlete or surgeon or academic. My friend R. tells me that sometimes you have to remind yourself that you love what you do.

Really, we register joy more in changes than in constancy. Perhaps it is because we have not learned to be content. Perhaps there is something about us that gets accustomed to things being a certain way. Regardless, you just get used to your life, it just becomes normal after a while. If all the people around you are movie stars, you just get used to hanging out with movie stars. Where normal people have friends from college on their cell phone contact list, you have names that make the covers of People magazine. A lot of things are far more cool from the outside looking in. Unless, of course, you buy into the hype and start believing that you are all the things that people think you are. Then you become an insufferable jerk, and that’s no good either. ‘Meaningless, all is meaningless, says the teacher.‘ Even in living your dreams, you cannot escape the Book of Ecclesiastes. After all, the book’s author was living every dream he ever had. Still, it is a blessing and a joy to do something you love. Passions are worth pursuing.

All blessings exist in context. Dreams are contextualized in time and space. The time for your dreams might not be now. The pieces may not all be in place, you may not be ready, or perhaps you may not yet completely understand your dream. Trying to pursue it though your own will ends in disaster. But this does not mean that you should leave your dreams behind. He does not give us dreams in vain; He uniquely gifts us so that we can gift others, so that we can give our gifts back to Him. So never give up on passions and dreams. Give them to Him instead. It may not yet be His time for your dreams, but He will work out your dreams in His time. Nothing comes back from Him void.

In the meantime, take care of your responsibilities. The man who is faithful with one city gets ten, the servant who invests a few talents gets many. Take care of the responsibilities incurred in the pursuit of current desires, and you will learn to be trustworthy with the greater responsibilities you will incur in the pursuit of your deeper dreams. If you do a good job with the things already in your hands, keeping them open before Him, you may find Him placing bigger and bigger things into those hands. He is faithful, and He promises that He will give us more than we can ask or imagine. Our dreams may not show up the way we expect, or even on this side of eternity, but they will show up. This is His promise: no eye has seen or ear heard of the things He has prepared for those who love Him. We will experience the fulfillment of that promise only in His presence.

Passion, like desire, will never fully arrive on this side of eternity. It is designed to bring us to God; only an impoverished desire will find itself content in this world. As the Spirit trains our passions, we will find that we feel those passions most strongly along the path that He sets out for us, a path that leads to Him. On that path, our dreams and our responsibilities can learn to coexist under His majesty. There, and only there, we will find the ultimate intersection of passion and purpose.