As a campus minister, it pains me to know that students are finishing their time in
high school and college these days, and we can’t get together to honor them.
All across the country and world, graduations have been cancelled, meaning there will be
no caps and gowns, no walking across the stage, and no inspirational speeches.
Thinking about all of you out there missing this life event, it just breaks my heart.
And so, even though I know I can’t make up for what’s lost, I decided to offer you
a graduation speech of my own.
It’s probably not exactly what you would have heard at your actual graduation, but
it is my advice to you as you begin the next stage of life.
Graduates of 2020, don’t follow your passion.
In the coming weeks and months and years, you will find yourself outside of the comfort
of your past life, thrust into a world you do
not know, faced with big, life-changing decisions.
What should I major in in college?
Where am I going to live?
What should I do with my life?
In all of these things, in all of the big decisions that you will have to make for the
rest of your life, remember this advice: don’t follow your passion.
The world will tell you that life is about doing what you like.
Do what makes you happy and you’ll never work a day in your life, they say.
Follow your passion and don’t let anyone take that away from you, they say.
I say… this is nonsense.
As catchy a slogan as it is to say follow your passion, the fact of the matter is that
passions don’t necessarily lead to success, and they rarely lead to fulfillment.
Because really, think about what a passion is—a passion is an emotion.
But not just any emotion—it’s an emotion so vibrant that it can barely be controlled,
an emotion that consumes our every thought and motivates our every action.
Passions are not things that we can set aside and deal with later—they demand our attention
and refuse to be ignored.
At their best, passions are what lead some to do heroic things like running into a burning
building to save lives, staying up all night to find the cure for a sick patient,
going against convention and creating something extraordinary.
They refuse to accept “no” for an answer, and so push us to places and achievements
we would have thought not possible.
At their best, they are quite powerful, but they are not always at their best.
Our passions can just as easily lead us to give in to temptations that won’t benefit
us in the long run, to get in fights over things that don’t matter, to seek instant
gratification and pleasure as our highest goal.
You see, what makes something a passion is not that it drives us to do better, it’s
that it drives us to do more.
It is not a path as much as it is a fire, an uncontrollable force that just wants to burn.
Our passions do not burn evenly or predictably, and they have no moral compass,
and so what we find in our lives is that our passions come and go.
They explode one moment in feelings of inspiration and motivation, but appear extinguished the next.
We may have been passionate about one thing when we were younger,
but find ourselves disinterested in it today.
To build your life around a passion is to build your life around something as illusive as fire.
It will most certainly have its extraordinary moments of intensity, but it will also leave
us in bitter valleys of apathy.
And I ask you, what then?
What do you do when you find yourself no longer energized or happy with your decisions?
What do you do when, having built your life around around following what brings you energy,
your passions change?
To follow your passion would suggest that if something no longer brings you happiness,
you should leave it behind and pursue what does.
If your career is dull, quit; go back to school and start again.
If your husband or wife doesn’t light a fire in you, leave them and find someone who does.
If you find that having kids are a drag, that all they do is take your energy and pull you
from what you really want to do, you gotta get rid of them.
Follow your passion, right?
At the end of the day, taken to its logical extreme—following your passion
as a life goal is fickle and selfish.
It is a life mantra that cares nothing of sacrifice, nothing of virtue, nothing of commitment…
it only cares about chasing after an illusive feeling.
Following your passion will bring you momentary glimpses of happiness and fulfillment, but
it is unlikely to bring you anything of lasting worth.
And so I say this: don’t follow YOUR passion.
Follow HIS passion.
Before the word passion was used to express a feeling of intense desire, it was a latin
word for suffering.
It was a word used to describe what Jesus did for all of humanity when he gave up his
desire for immediate gratification, comfort, pleasure, or self-fulfillment—when he gave
up his life for others.
When we follow his passion and not ours, we build our life not around a changing emotion,
but an everlasting commitment to goodness and love; we seek not to do what is immediately
best for us but what is best for the eternal Kingdom of God, inbreaking in our midst.
When I think about living my life in this way, I am reminded, believe it or not, of
Bono’s words in a speech he gave many years ago.
He said, “Stop asking God to bless what you're doing.
Get involved in what God is doing, because it's already blessed.”
In other words, stop doing what you want to do and hoping it’s okay with God, stop following
your passions and praying to God that you’ll get everything you want.
Start seeking the Kingdom, start doing what pleases God, start living with the mission
of Christ and zeal for justice and let yourself become passionate about that.
Even more than this, what is often left off of this quote, whichis a shame because I think it’s the really
prophetic part of it, is he says, “Well, let’s get involved in what God is doing.
God, as I say, is always with the poor.
That’s what God is doing.
That’s what He’s calling us to do.”
When we look at the life of Christ, the passion that he endured for our sake, what we see
is a man who cared intimately about the poor and the lowly, who gave himself up not for
those who could help themselves but precisely for those who were desperate.
That is what he did as an example, and that is precisely what he calls us to do with our lives.
Graduates, as you look to the next stage of your life, embarking on this new and exciting journey,
you will be asked to make some pretty big decisions that will affect your life for
years to come.
How you choose to spend your time, what you choose to follow, matters a great deal.
But it doesn’t just matter to you.
It doesn’t just affect your life.
How you choose to spend your time, what you choose to follow will have an affect on everyone
around you—the people you meet on a given day, your friends and family, your community…
your world.
You can choose to follow what you want, what brings you happiness, and you might even be
successful in achieving it.
But what about everyone else?
How will the people around you benefit from your passion?
If you’re looking for a life to be successful and leave you feeling fulfilled when it’s
all over, don’t follow your passion.
Follow his.
Let your life be one of immense mercy, giving to those who cannot repay you.
Let it be one of self-sacrifice, in which you care more about the well-being of others
than you do about yourself.
Let it be one of humility, never shying away from weakness or embarrassment if it might
bring an opportunity for God to be strong through you.
Let if be one of overflowing joy, so that even in hardship, even when the world seems
to be crashing down all around you, others may know that your hope is not in passing
things, but in eternal gladness that cannot be taken away.
It is not the normal path, nor is it necessarily an easy one.
The world will tell you over and over again that you are smart, that you are powerful,
that you can accomplish anything you want so follow your passion and don’t let anyone
get in your way.
And I have no doubt that this is true.
You’ve gotten here today because you are smart, and you are powerful, and you can accomplish
incredible things on your own.
My question to you this: why would you want to?
And the end of your life, do you want to be able to say that you followed your passion
and always did what you wanted, or do you want to be able to say that you played a part
in making the Kingdom of God more present in our midst?
Class of 2020, you are destined for amazing things… all you have to do is keep your
eyes on his passion and not your own.
God bless, and go dawgs.