Note: This is an edited version of a commencement speech I gave earlier this month.
The world preaches the power of passion, autonomy, and self-discovery to young people.
David Brooks pointed this out in a 2011 opinion piece for the New York Times. He writes:
“If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself.”
While passion, personal autonomy, and self-discovery are encouraged from most graduation stages across America, I’d like to encourage you to do something that Brooks also encourages in his article: to lay down your life.
An impactful life is shaped by committed, serving, and oftentimes, unrewarded love.
If we asked people on the street if they wanted to live an impactful life, I expect many would say “yes”. And yet we are all faced with an impending sense of futility. Our culture is stuffed full with everything we could possibly want and yet we’re simultaneously both hungry and sick to our stomachs.
In our culture, an impactful life looks like an amazing career, collecting power, and sitting in the driver’s seat of our lives. Over time however, we’ve confused impactful living for self-serving living. Leaders show off their success and the “difference” they’re making. Our culture is beginning to recognize the shallowness of materialism but the roots are still at work under the ground: passion, autonomy, and self-discovery. It takes discernment to see these roots in your own life. If we aren’t careful, these principles can even express themselves in things like “finding work you love”.
We can’t afford to go on like this. I’m sure you’ve noticed. The world we live in is filled with pain, evil, and challenges. Every human you come into contact with has been deeply wounded and broken, whether we recognize it or not.
Relying on passion, autonomy, and self-discovery in this world is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. It’s futile and won’t end well.
There is a far better road to an impactful life but I will warn you: it’s a road less traveled. It’s also far more difficult of a road than the one that many in our culture follow.
I want to introduce you to a man who can teach us much about this better road to a life of impact. His name is Lee Jong-Rak and he lives in Seoul, South Korea. He is a pastor and he is a father to 19 children, all but two of which have been adopted.
Pastor Lee runs a very unique ministry. Embedded into the wall of his church is a box. A sign above the box reads “Place to leave babies”. At the time when the box was built, hundreds of babies were being abandoned in the streets of Seoul. There were a number of reasons but inability to financially provide for the child and a child’s special needs usually topped the list.
In the cold streets of Seoul, abandonment was a death sentence. Babies froze or starved to death.
Over a decade, an estimated 1,500 babies have been saved from freezing or starving to death on the streets of Seoul, through the “Baby Box”. Pastor Lee works to find homes for the children who have been left with him. Some he has even taken into his own home and adopted as his own children. Few of us can confidently say we’ve saved anyone’s life, much less 1,500 lives.
And yet, Lee Jong-Rak remains largely unknown. He remains a simple South Korean pastor who pours his time and energy into saving and caring for unwanted children that have been left outside his church.
This is a life of impact, most can agree. And yet it lacks the elements of passion, autonomy, and self-discovery.
Passion, autonomy, and self-discovery will not lead you to an impactful life. Here are three actions that will:
Find a problem that summons your life.
Our culture preaches the power of passion and urges young people to follow their passions. But this oftentimes can lead to a very self-serving life. That’s not to say that passions are bad. God has put things on your heart and made you excited about them, for a reason. But instead of following your passions to self-fulfillment, let them lead you to a problem that summons your life. David Brooks again reminds us:
“Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life…Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.”
In her book The Mark of a Man, Elizabeth Eliot speaks of the Apostle Paul’s calling. She writes:
“In nearly every one of his letters he affirms his call — something that came to him from outside his own opinion or inclination; something ‘imposed’ on him, which he could not dodge. It was not cause for boasting, but for submission.”
Pastor Lee didn’t set out to build an organization because he was passionate. He was simply available. The baby box was started because of one girl left on his front step. The need drove him to act.
What needs are driving you? What problems are facing you and those close to you? How can you approach your passions as ways to serve and meet needs, rather than ways to find self-fulfillment?
Start by looking around you. Look nearby. The closer you are to the need, the more equipped you will be to help provide a solution. Start with your family, your neighborhood, your wider community.
Perhaps the problem that summons your life will arrive on your doorstep, like it did for Pastor Lee.
Make sacred commitments.
Autonomy will make us a feather in the wind. Sacred commitments will plant us where we will yield harvest.
Brooks writes:
“College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.”
One of the many things that Pastor Lee gave up when he built the baby box was his autonomy. Paul Miller writes in his book A Loving Life:
“Often our difficulties with love are simply that we react to the constriction that accompanies love. But that constriction is inherent in love. To love is to limit.”
Pastor Lee’s life has certainly been limited, constricted. His baby box is equipped with an alarm that rings in his home when a child is left. In the middle of the night, the alarm rings and Pastor Lee and his family rush into action before the baby freezes in the box. For Pastor Lee, love looks like many sleepless nights and the constant interruption of daily life.
A sacred commitment may take a variety of forms for you in different seasons of life. It may look like pledging your life to one person in marriage. Maybe it means staying in a small town and meeting needs, rather than riding off into the sunset to blaze your own trail. It could be a job, a congregation, a calling, a relationship.
This is not, of course, to say that you can’t move on from some things. Not every commitment is meant to be sacred and eternally-binding. But all too often our culture has embraced a gospel of autonomy that quickly cuts away anything that holds us down from where we want to go.
Let’s remember Christ’s example:
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Christ gives us a perfect example of making a daring and sacrificial commitment. He was not committed half-way. He did not abort his mission when the heartache hit. He was committed to us to the very end.
When Jesus appears to his disciples after his Resurrection, he invites them to touch his scars, implying that he has (and continues to have) a physical body. God’s incarnation with us has left eternal marks, further expressing the weight of his commitment to us.
Sacrifice in secret.
Self-discovery is often accompanied by a desire to build a following. We don’t just want to discover ourselves. We want others to discover us as well.
Brooks wraps up his op-ed with these words:
“Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.”
Jesus agrees! He says in Matthew 10:39:
“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Again, the words of Jesus, from John 12:24:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Many of you would agree with me, I think, that Pastor Lee Jong-Rak has found his life. He has found his fruitful harvest. He is living a life of impact. The road he took there was paved with secret, unseen, sacrifice.
It will hurt a lot when you love and never get recognized for it. But in that secret sacrifice, in humbling yourself, you will find that Christ himself is with you. And you will find life.
God makes a stunning statement in Isaiah 57:15:
“For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.’”
It’s also important to note here: it’s really essential to have a community of support as you love unseen. Unrecognized self-sacrifice is incredibly lonely. Find community with your Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Then find community in fellow brothers and sisters who can point you to the eternal fountain that can keep your cup overflowing.
Don’t trust on passion, autonomy, and self-discovery to build you an impactful life. Find a problem that summons your life, make sacred commitments, and sacrifice in secret.
In short: lay down your life.
You may not immediately see any sweeping impact. You won’t be able to trace your mark on history. That’s okay. The impact is still there.
Imagine that the elderly on your street are no longer lonely in their final years on Earth. Imagine that your town has no need for foster care because of the love of families to care for at-risk children. Imagine your community transformed by the small work of great lovers.
Don’t be afraid of laying down your life.
Take the road less traveled that leads to a far richer treasure.