You’ve probably heard some version of it your whole life: Find your calling. Follow your passion. Do what makes you come alive. And if you can get paid for it? Even better — that’s how you know you’re really living in your purpose, right?
It sounds great. Biblical, even. Until your passion stops feeling like a gift and starts feeling like a job you can’t clock out of.
We love the idea of merging what we love with how we make a living. But turning your passion into your career is riskier than we like to admit — especially when you believe your calling is this prepackaged, God-given path you just haven’t found yet. It creates a pressure cooker of expectation that quietly erodes your joy and self-worth.
Liz Bohannon, founder of Sseko Designs and author of Beginner’s Pluck, calls out this myth directly: “To believe that your passion and purpose exists, fully formed ‘out there’ like the handsome Italian moped–driving love interest in a straight-to-DVD Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie, and is waiting to be found is a kind of lunacy.”
She’s not being flippant. She’s being honest about the anxiety so many twentysomethings carry — that if you haven’t “found your thing” by now, something must be wrong with you.
“I wonder if you’ve ever felt the same pang of insecurity and shame that comes from recognizing you might be semi-decent and enjoy a few things,” she says, “but that you haven’t yet found your thing?”
That shame is manufactured. It’s the byproduct of a culture that treats purpose like a soulmate: singular, mysterious, destiny-driven — and devastating to miss. We treat calling like a cosmic treasure hunt, and if we don’t find it early enough, we assume we’ve failed.
But Bohannon flips the script: “You will never find your passion and purpose,” she says. Not because you’re incapable. But because it doesn’t work like that.
“Passion isn’t a preexisting condition,” she explains. “A life of purpose and passion can’t be found. It is the result of being brave, curious and, dare I say, plucky? You do not find your passion and purpose. You build it.”
That’s a radical reframing — and one that could save a lot of Christians from spiritual and emotional burnout.
Because when passion becomes a paycheck, it becomes vulnerable to all the things that come with a paycheck: deadlines, criticism, burnout, performance anxiety, bills. And suddenly that thing you loved — painting, writing, youth ministry, songwriting — now comes with quotas and KPIs and the gnawing fear that maybe you peaked in 2021 and didn’t even know it.
There’s a deeper spiritual issue at play here too. We confuse passion with calling, and we confuse calling with career. But the Bible never said your worth is found in your job title. Jesus called fishermen and tax collectors. Paul made tents. Work matters, yes. But calling is about who you are, not just what you do for money.
There’s this cultural idea that if you’re not monetizing your talent, you’re wasting it. But making your creative outlet your full-time job doesn’t always make you feel more fulfilled. Sometimes it just makes you tired.
The Stanford Center on Adolescence found that 8 out of 10 people say they haven’t “found their passion” and don’t have a clear vision for where they want to go in life. If that sounds like you, you’re in the majority. You’re also not doing it wrong.
Maybe we’re just asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, “What is my passion?” — what if we asked, What am I interested in? Interest, as Bohannon puts it, will suffice. “It’s in the simple work of being interested and the brave work of exploring and the sacred work of trying and failing and trying again where passion and purpose are not found, but built.”
And for Christians especially, that’s a more faithful framework. Because walking with God isn’t a job hunt. It’s a lifelong process of listening, showing up, pivoting, recommitting and sometimes stepping into the unknown — not because you found your calling, but because you’re building it, one yes at a time.
So if your side hustle doesn’t scale, or your dream job turns out to be kind of terrible, or you don’t have a five-year plan neatly mapped out — that’s not a failure. That’s life. And it’s holy ground.
Because in the words of Antonio Machado, “Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.”
