Passion and Purpose

If you’ve been on the music section of my website, you’ve seen these two words, passion and purpose, in a quote by a long-time family friend, Joey Reyes Owen: “Isn’t it a joy when your passion and your purpose collide?”  This week I found another quote that ties together these two words:

When the Lord wishes to direct his people,” hymn composer and choir director Evan Stephens reflected, “his favorite mode of procedure seems to be not so much to thunder his commands from the mountains of clouds.” Far more often, in Stephens’s experience, “some quiet, unknown man or woman is unconsciously attuned into a fit instrument for the work.” First, “an intense desire is in some simple, natural way created in the person to accomplish something.” When a person’s individual passions and efforts match the Lord’s purposes, “more and more grows the desire and the joy in the labors of pursuit; more and more dawns upon their vision the possibilities” until “through the fruits of the labors of these inspired persons a people are found to have attained, to a more or less perfect degree, that particular goal and purpose desired by the Lord.”

(Evan Stephens, “M.I.A. in Music,” Improvement Era, vol. 28, no. 8 (June 1925), 730)

When individual passions match the Lord’s purposes- that’s where the magic happens!

TTFN!