When I was young, I stood on my toy box and sang songs. I didn’t worry if people liked them, write them down, or try to refine them. I didn’t ask myself if they were “marketable,” and I certainly didn’t think about selling them.

I sang songs because I loved to sing.

When I got a little bit older, I climbed trees, and I would go to the highest branches and sing as loud as I could. I didn’t care who heard or if anyone heard. I definitely didn’t care if they liked it.

I sang songs because I loved to sing. 

I went to college and realized that it was hard to make it as a musician, and I wondered if my passion was “marketable” or something that would make me money. I began to have a five-year plan, a ten-year plan, and a life plan – not because I thought about it but because people kept asking me about it. My teachers would tell me I needed to know what I was going to do with my life, and the 18-year-old version of me struggled to come up with an answer that would win me affirmation rather than the strange and concerned looks that I received when I said, “I don’t know.” Those looks were even worse when I responded with something that resembled what I loved to do.

I needed to find something that made me money, a life plan that would allow me to retire comfortably at 65, and a way to forget about what I loved to do and figure out who would buy what I did. 

Ever since that realization, there has been tension. Even in church ministry, a pathway where I’ve counted the costs and recognized that the reward is heavenly (and not necessarily in the car you drive or the house in which you live), I find myself asking about “return on investment.”

I look at the ways I spend my time and wonder what I will get in return. If something isn’t helping me make money, get ahead, get recognized, or move to the next stop, I wonder if I should do it – even if I enjoy it. If something isn’t immediately successful – at least in the monetary sense – I wonder if I should keep devoting time to it. If it isn’t profitable, why try?

This is my challenge – I can chase affirmation, fame, notoriety, or money – and never love any of what I do. The strange tension is that they don’t work out when I engage in things I don’t love. I can do my best at things that, on paper, look like they should work. Yet, after grinding, I find myself unhappy and unsuccessful. This is true even with good things in ministry that help others. If I do them for the wrong reasons, it doesn’t matter. It is much worse than if I didn’t do anything at all. 

The key could be to reclaim the tree-top mentality when I sang for no one in particular except an audience of one. Many of my “tree-top songs” were hymns I sang in Church. Does it matter if “an audience” will read what I write if I love to write and, more importantly, if God has called me to write? I find myself turning over ideas for books, blogs, resources, and projects that have a high appeal, but I don’t love any of them – if I can’t say they bring me life, how can I say that they truly honor God? But then I find myself stuck with ideas that I am excited about. I feel like no one will listen to them… so I don’t write them. 

But I have had this tiny voice, the voice of a child, resonating in my head lately—you aren’t called to be successful; you are called to honor God. What is in His will for your life is up to Him; how you respond to that call with fidelity is up to you. There is wisdom here for me and wisdom for all of us. 

We can sometimes get so caught up in what we should do, that we fail to ask what God is calling us to do. We can get so concerned about what will help us be “comfortable” that we forget what we love. Our eyes can seek out the praise and affirmation of “the audience” that we stop performing for the Audience of One. 

This is the paradox—it is in doing what God calls us toward—which sometimes looks like foolishness to the world—that we find real peace, joy, comfort, and, dare I say, “stability.” God does not forsake those who do His will or at least seek with their hearts to do their best to follow it. 

From restless self-seeking, deliver me, Jesus. Help me return to the trees and sing the songs I love, the songs you put in my heart, and trust that you will use my voice to change the world or at least comfort the birds in the branches with me.