Transcript
Speaker: Maybe escaping the vocation traps isn't just about personal creative fulfillment or private spiritual formation. What if it's about cultural responsibility?
Speaker: Hello, welcome back to Be, Make, Do, a Soulmakers podcast where we explore what it takes to live out your call in the arts with spiritual wholeness and creative freedom. I'm your host, Lisa Smith, here with our producer, Danny BH. Hello, everyone. And it is our passion to encourage you to become who you were created to be, make what you were created to make, and do what you were created to do.
Speaker: Okay, so here we are. This season on the podcast, we've walked through what we've been calling the vocation traps, the security trap, the happiness trap, the hero trap, and the chosen trap.
Speaker: And we've looked at biblical stories, biblical lives like Abraham and Sarah, Joseph, Moses, and Ruth. And what we've been seeing again and again is this.
Speaker: Everyone gets stuck in traps based on fear. And they're traps because they become mistaken stories we play in our heads about what calling is and where meaning comes from and what we're responsible for. And when those stories go unquestioned, we get stuck.
Speaker: Not because we don't care enough, but because we care deeply and we're trying to carry weight that we were never meant to carry. Yeah. And I think what's striking is how familiar these traps feel. Like like they don't feel like mistakes per se. They they feel reasonable and logical when you understand each of the traps that you know you may fall into. Exactly, exactly. The traps catch us because they feel reasonable.
Speaker: The security trap says, if I could just be certain, if I could be validated and safe and approved, then I could finally move forward. When the happiness trap says, if this is my true calling, it should feel good or at least feel fulfilling all the time.
Speaker: The hero trap says, if this really matters, then it's up to me to make it happen. And the chosen trap says, there must be one right thing that I am meant to do, and I'm terrified of missing it.
Speaker: But what we've been uncovering as we've been talking is this. Each of these traps quietly put us at the center of the story.
Speaker: My clarity, my feelings, my certainty, my impact. And the biblical calling story asks us to step out of that center, not because we don't matter, but because the story was never about us at the center to begin with.
Speaker: Now, from the very beginning of this series, we've been working with a particular biblical imagination, one that sees scripture not as a set of instructions for self-optimization, but as a story that we're invited into, like a five-act play, where we have act one is creation, then Israel, then Jesus, the church, and finally, the fulfillment of all things.
Speaker: And we've acknowledged that we are not in Act 1 and we're not waiting for Act 3 to happen and we're not responsible for Act 5. We're living in Act 4, which means this, the decisive work has already been done.
Speaker: The ending is already promised and our calling is not to control the story, but to bear witness to it. And that's where our freedom comes from.
Speaker: When we live as though the story depends on us, calling becomes insecurity and burnout. But when we remember that this is God's story and that reality itself is held together by God, calling becomes something very different.
Speaker: It becomes participation. It becomes improvisation, even play, right? Not striving to get somewhere, but learning how to just show up faithfully where we already are.
Speaker: So wanna end this series by naming two concrete areas of practice, not as techniques, but as ways of inhabiting that act for space.
Speaker: And we've seen them in the Bible, in the lives we've been talking about, and really in every artist who sustains a faithful grounded life over time, this is the key. So the two things are prayerful listening,
Speaker: and faithful action in the everyday. You've already heard us talk about these repeatedly through this vocation trap series. We want to be in a space of prayerful listening and faithful action in the everyday, regardless of your circumstances.
Speaker: So now when we turn to those two practices, prayerful listening and faithful action, I want you to hear them not as how to fix your creative life or as self-help, but as how artists are trained to live faithfully in act four of God's story.
Speaker: All right. So first, prayerful listening is how we learn to live in a reality that doesn't begin or end with us. If you think about Matthew 7, 7 8, Jesus talks about asking, seeking, knocking, and he'll respond.
Speaker: And I think this is a great formula for prayerful listening, but I'm gonna reverse it. So it'll go knock, seek, ask. So knock reminds us to cultivate silence and solitude, spaces where competing voices just kind of quiet enough for us to notice What's actually moving us?
Speaker: Are we being motivated by what's what God has put in us, our our our archetype motivations? Are we being motivated by fear? So knock, setting that space for silence and solitude.
Speaker: Then seek, I can't stress enough the importance of immersing ourselves in the story of the Bible, not just to extract answers, but to learn the character and the story of God so that we recognize God's voice when it comes and we recognize the larger story that we're living in.
Speaker: And then finally, yourself. practicing waiting and actually asking God questions. I can't tell you how often i notice myself and other people when we go to ask God something that we forget to ask the question and then wait to listen for an answer.
Speaker: We kind of pose a question and then start thinking through the answer in our own minds. But this process of in silence and solitude, actually asking God a question and then practicing the waiting part to see what God might have to say rather than resisting to just the urge to just answer for God too quickly.
Speaker: That kind of prayer doesn't immediately give us clarity about what to do, but what it's doing is reshaping who we're becoming. It helps us to shape our minds to listen into something bigger than our feelings and our immediate circumstances, but to listen into the larger story and to recognize God's voice.
Speaker: So knock, seek, and ask to practice this prayerful listening. And then the second practice is faithful action. if you remember, I think it was in the last episode, we talked about discernment and discernment including that quiet listening, but also having a second part of faithful action and taking action in order to learn something.
Speaker: So we're not talking about the big heroic action that that solves the problem or even strategic action that helps position you in a place. It's not action driven by panic or visibility. Faithful action is just choosing to live as though what you do today matters.
Speaker: What you create today matters. Showing up in the studio today matters, even when you can't see the outcome. And we saw this in the stories that we looked in in the Bible, Abraham and Sarah, learning to trust through small, costly steps.
Speaker: Joseph, learning to act with integrity, even when it cost him everything. And the story of Ruth showing up in loyalty and doing the work before any kind of calling or result was revealed to her.
Speaker: And obviously Moses learning faithfulness over a long, long period of time before leadership showed up. For us as artists, that faithfulness looks like acting with integrity, even when no one is watching, showing up in the studio, the practice space, showing up to the page daily, quietly, imperfectly, even when it doesn't feel good, practicing loyalty to God's will over public approval or what we think will get us likes.
Speaker: And just treating your creative practice as a meaningful spiritual activity, a meaningful act of service, even when it feels small and you're not sure who the audience is going to be.
Speaker: You practice the faithfulness and then God forms faithfulness in you. Yeah, I think this is an extremely important part.
Speaker: And seriously, like what a time for it right now. And I think it's because it exemplifies by moving from being to doing, but without that pressure of productivity that you mentioned.
Speaker: And I also see this like through line of a visible success or important results that's actually stemmed from the quiet work, the invisible work. And yeah, I think i think that's such a good reminder to know you know how you got there.
Speaker: Well, and the belief that how you got there is as important as where you got. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay, now, stay with me.
Speaker: I want to widen the lens one more time. Because if we miss this, it's easy to hear this whole series as a personal encouragement and self-help podcast rather than what it actually is.
Speaker: Escaping the vocation traps is not just about you feeling better or finding clarity in your creative life or even just you getting unstuck.
Speaker: It's about what kind of culture we are collectively shaping through our work and our activity, whether we mean to or not. We're living in a moment where culture is doing more formative work than institutions ever could.
Speaker: Stories, images, algorithms, entertainment, and media, they're not just reflecting reality back to us anymore. They are constructing it They're teaching us what to desire and what to fear and who to trust and what it even means to be human. And most of this formation is happening below the level of consciousness of most of us most of the time, which means whoever is shaping culture right now is quietly discipling the imagination of the world.
Speaker: Now, one of the central claims of the Christian story and one that has largely disappeared from our shared imagination is that reality itself is contingent upon God.
Speaker: By that, I mean the world does not hold itself together. Meaning is not something we make up. It's not self-generated. Truth isn't something we invent to survive.
Speaker: But the dominant cultural story we're swimming in tells us the opposite of that. It tells us that you're on your own to figure it out. Meaning is something you kind of just manufacture. Identity is something you create.
Speaker: Worth is something that you prove and power belongs to those who control attention. But that's an awful story to live inside. And we all feel it.
Speaker: And when artists, most of the time, I think unintentionally, when we almost can't help but absorb this story, our work begins to reflect that.
Speaker: And that's where the vocation traps stop being personal and start becoming cultural, start taking on a cultural level impact. The security trap doesn't just produce anxiety in us as artists, it produces work that's shaped by approval and trends and safety. It avoids truth-telling because it can't risk rejection.
Speaker: And when we fall into the happiness trap, it's not just a risk of us burning out, it's training us to believe that discomfort, grief, and struggle are failures rather than embracing them as the places where meaning and honesty and transformation begin.
Speaker: And the hero trap trains artists to believe that we have to control outcomes. We have to be responsible for fixing the world, say something, or justify our work through the impact that we make rather than just trusting that God works through faithfulness in ways that we can't measure.
Speaker: And the chosen trap feeds the myth that only exceptional or rare or successful or influential lives matter. leaving most people quietly convinced that your daily faithfulness is insignificant.
Speaker: And so many people stop creating because they think it doesn't matter. When these traps shape artists, they're not just trapping us as individuals.
Speaker: They're shaping the stories we collectively tell, the worlds we imagine, the futures we assume are inevitable. And this is why artists matter so much right now.
Speaker: Because we don't just comment on culture. We create the conditions through which people perceive reality. The work of artists gives language to longings that people can't articulate.
Speaker: it It makes invisible assumptions visible and trains people how to see and how to feel and how to hope and how to lament. In the Bible, this work, that work of helping people to see and articulate has always belonged to priests and prophets, not you know fortune tellers or religious performers, but people who help communities remember what is true, especially when it's inconvenient or costly.
Speaker: When we talk about the prophets in the Bible, they didn't you know invent new realities or come up with new things. They named the one that everyone was trying to forget.
Speaker: And the priests weren't manufacturing meaning. They were creating spaces and practices and symbols that made God's presence perceptible in ordinary life.
Speaker: And I think that's the lineage that Christian artists stand in. I think we're more akin to these roles than just purveyors of creativity.
Speaker: It's creativity in service to something, creativity in service to one another and to God. And now here we are standing in a moment of accelerated urgency,
Speaker: We're moving rapidly into a world shaped by artificial intelligence, by algorithmic storytelling, and endlessly just generated churning out content.
Speaker: And these systems are incredibly efficient. ah can't deny that, but they're not human. They don't suffer or love or hope or repent or wrestle with God or have relationships with others, yet they are increasingly defining what stories get told, what images circulate, what questions feel worth asking and what futures seem plausible.
Speaker: The question is, who is forming the imagination of the future and from what story? And here's here's the danger and the cry of my heart.
Speaker: If artists of faith are also unformed and anxious and chasing validation or trapped in fear-based narratives, then the Christian imagination just quietly disappears from public life.
Speaker: Not because anybody silenced it, but because it never showed up with clarity and courage and depth.
Speaker: This is why spiritual formation is not optional. It's not private spirituality or self-care.
Speaker: It is cultural responsibility. We want to be artists who are deeply formed, creatives and makers and writers and performers who can tell the truth without being reactive, who can hold ambiguity without collapsing into relativism.
Speaker: Artists and people who can imagine hope without sentimentality and critique culture without becoming cynical and create without needing to control what other people think or do.
Speaker: That I think is what the world is starving for, not louder Christian messaging, not safer content, but artists and the work of artists whose lives and work quietly testify to this deeper reality.
Speaker: Artists whose work doesn't scream, but breathes faith and trust and patience and courage and love.
Speaker: So here's what I hope you carry with you as we close this series. You are being invited again and again into a way of life that trusts God with the story and takes responsibility only for your faithfulness, knowing that your work matters, your presence matters.
Speaker: Your small, ordinary acts of making matter. Not because they save the world, but because they bear witness to the one who already has.
Speaker: And when artists learn to live this way, free and grounded and listening and acting faithfully, we don't just get unstuck.
Speaker: We become soul makers. People who create evidence that God is alive and at work in our time. If this series has stirred something in you, I hope you would share it with a friend.
Speaker: I hope you'll sign up for our newsletter and come and join us in our circles as we are building a movement together of soul maker artists who are taking responsibility for the work that we are creating and for what God has called us to put out into the world.
Speaker: What you do matters. Thanks for listening.
Speaker: You've been listening to Be Make do a Soulmakers podcast. We invite you to stay connected with us through our Instagram at BeMakeDoPodcasts, signing up for our newsletter at soulmakers.org, or simply by listening and sharing our podcast.
Speaker: All links and resources for this episode can be found in our show notes.
