“God’s will is much more a way than a thing.”
How the truth that “God’s will is much more a way than a thing” leads to a radical freedom in life and work, the difference between “justifying your legitimacy” and “expressing your belovedness” through your work, and the most brilliant interpretation of Ecclesiastes I’ve ever heard.
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[00:00:05] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. I’m Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians? Those of us who aren’t pastors, or religious professionals, but who work as oil rig workers, historians, and tailors. That's the question we explore every week. Today, I'm posing it to Dave Evans. He's a co-founder of EA Sports and the Stanford Life Design Lab, and the author of the mammoth best seller, Designing Your Life.
Dave and I sat down and had one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had in my life period, full stop. Much less than one of the most interesting conversations here on this podcast. We talked about how the truth that God's will is much more of a way than a thing leads to radical freedom in your life at work. We talked about the difference between justifying your legitimacy and expressing your belovedness through your work. Dave also shared maybe the most brilliant interpretation of Ecclesiastes I've ever heard. There's a lot in here. You got to keep up with Dave who's going, but don't miss a minute of this terrific conversation with Dave Evans.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:23] JR: Dave Evans, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[00:01:26] DE: Jordan, good to be with you.
[00:01:28] JR: Your story is wild to me. It started out wanting to be a marine biologist. Right?
[00:01:35] DE: Yes.
[00:01:35] JR: Then alternative energy, you wound up at Apple leading product marketing for the mouse and these laser printing teams. By the way, what years were you at Apple?
[00:01:43] DE: ‘79 to ’83.
[00:01:45] JR: Was that a good time at Apple?
[00:01:47] DE: Yes, I arrived six weeks before the IPO, and I was there on the Lisa team. If you saw the Steve Jobs movie, which I didn't because why see something when you were there, during the Joanna Hoffman era, those are all my peeps. So, I worked with all those. I wasn't in the movie. But that was my generation. In fact, when I got asked to go co-found what became Electronic Arts with my boss, Trip Hawkins, Jobs walked me around the parking lot for three hours trying to talk me into being the division marketing director for Macintosh. So, that's why I was there.
[00:02:15] JR: What was that pitch like?
[00:02:17] DE: “Well, I think this software company, Dave, I mean, it might be kind of interesting. I mean, it might make – I think it could be 50, maybe, $150 million business. What we're doing, you just have to decide if you want to make a ding in the universe or not.” Little did Steve realize we were starting what became a multi, multibillion-dollar industry that dwarfs the movie industry. But he didn't see that coming at the time. It was a pretty effective pitch. I mean, I really was torn between two goods at that point, and obviously decided to go the EA route.
[00:02:46] JR: Why did you go to EA Sports? Why did you leave Apple?
[00:02:50] DE: Well, in fact, it's very specifically, it wasn't EA Sports, though. I can tell you I know the exact moment we decided to invent EA Sports. I left Apple – well, that kind of goes back to why did I join Apple in the first place, which was exactly not what I was committed to out of a sense of spiritual commitment to my vocation. So, you may want to go back upstream, like how did you end up doing that thing? Because the way Apple started was, I was working part time in a solar energy startup, working on solar hot water heating systems. I had a welding torch in my hand in the lab where I was building a test rig for a new product with a couple of guys I've been doing grad research with at Stanford. The phone rang and they said, “Dave it’s for you.” I got on the phone and it was Apple Computer. I said, “Oh, you don't want me, you want the Dave Evans over at Hewlett Packard, he's the computer guy. I'm not into it. Don't bother me.” And I hung up.
[00:03:39] JR: Wrong Dave Evans.
[00:03:40] DE: Yes, there’s tons – I'm David John the fourth in my own family. My kids, the fifth. His kids, the sixth. You can get Dave Evans in 24 packs at Costco. It is an incredibly common white guy name, and people often confuse me with the heavy metal Rocker from Australia. But that's a different guy.
[00:03:57] JR: If only.
[00:03:59] DE: Literally. So, they call back and they're like, “No, no, we want to talk to you again.” “No, you don't want to talk to me. By the way, I don't want to talk to you. I have no interest in being the computer industry. I may not be able to do what I'm doing what I'm currently trying to do. But the one thing I promised myself is I will not capitulate just because I live in Northern California, and end up working in the computer business, because it's so freaking boring.” That's where my high-tech career started, and then they kept calling back. “Look, we're Apple, we're arrogant. If anybody hangs up on the phone, it's us, not you. Talk to me for a minute.” I kind of go, “Well, you're wasting my time.”
That turned into, they finally said, “Well, you just come over have lunch with us once.” And Jobs had just been on the cover of Time magazine. I thought, well, what the heck. Get the free tour. They're paying for lunch. At the end of that lunch, they figured out that I wasn't kidding. “Oh, yes, we really have no business talking to you at all. You don't know anything about what we do.” I go, “No, I told you that. I don't even know how you got my resume. It doesn't make any sense.” They said, “Yes, but it turns out you're more interesting than we thought. What do you want to do now?” I said, “Well, you called me. That’s my question. What do you want to do?” They kind of go, “Well, we're not sure what to do with you. I’ll tell you, would you just be willing to come back and meet some more people?” I said, “Well, you are more interesting than I thought you'd be too. Sure.” We did that 14 times.
[00:05:08] JR: That's amazing.
[00:05:10] DE: Fourteen times, that's how my illustrious technology career got started.
[00:05:14] JR: Today, you describe your work as helping others answer the question, what do I do with my life? What happened either at Apple or EA or somewhere else in the path that caused you to really want to sink your teeth into helping others answer this question?
[00:05:28] DE: Well, it's exactly the title of your show. It's the mere Christian problem. So, back a million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the campus, I'm a sophomore at Stanford, in like 1972, ’73, I just turned 70 on Easter Sunday. So, I'm old. Eleven grandkids. At that point, I was starting to take my faith pretty seriously. I'd sort of dallied with it for a while, and then I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that I was not going to go into the professional ministry. I was getting a lot – I was working with the university. I was on the campus board and all that stuff. And everybody goes, “Oh, you should go to the ministry. You should serve the Lord.” I went, “No, I don't think so. I think I'm going to do that regular person thing, what you call a mere Christian.”
I just made this self-evident observation that it looks to me like most people spent most of their waking energies at this thing we call work, one way or another, whatever that might be. Whether you make money of it or not, or you’re at home with kids, whatever it is, that's the big expression of the human experience. Then, they told you that your life mattered, and you knew your life mattered because Jesus died for it. In fact, if yours was the only one, Jordan, they would have come just for you. Whoa, man, I'm of incredible value. So, if I'm of incredible value, and that's the largest single expression of this thing called me, then it's got to be of incredible value.
So, what's this work stuff about? I went around starting to interview the thoughtful, reliable, credible lay people, in technical term, a layperson. Another way of saying mere Christian. So, I go to the youngest ever Executive Vice President of Crown Zellerbach, who's an elder in my church, and the guy that teaches the big men's Bible study at 6 dark 30 in the morning on Saturday for God's sake. 150 guys show up to that Bible study, like, he must know what the drill is all about. It's a long and painful story, which I'll try to shorten, and it boils down to the grownups were totally unhelpful. I'm talking to this guy who's running an insurance business, and it goes, so what does God think of State Farm Insurance? And he goes –
[00:07:16] JR: Never thought about that before.
[00:07:19] DE: “I think he thinks it's fine.” I go, “Well, so what does it mean to you to be a Christian in the workplace? What is your faith mean to your work? What is your work with your faith?” He goes, “Oh, well.” This guy's an elder in a big church and he goes, “Well, I take good care of my people. I take really good care of my employees. And oh, I never cheat on my taxes.” I go, “Great. So, you're not a jerk and you're not a thief. That's a pretty low bar. That's the Christian distinctive? I mean, I know plenty of pagans who are non-jerk, non-thieving people. Is that all you got for me?” And it goes on and on from there. I mean, dozens of these conversations and they're hellaciously, heartbreakingly horrible. I'm difficult now at 70. In my 20s, I was insufferably difficult. I mean, I was really pissed off. I was really, really, still am frankly, pissed off like, why are the grownups holding out on me?
One of two things is true. This Christianity stuff is crap. It's totally incoherent and doesn't mean anything, or they're all lying to me. Because there's no way they're all checking their brand at the door and living this incredibly bifurcated reality where what they do and what they believe means nothing to one another, and the thing they care about the most, which is their work, and the thing they claim is the most meaningful thing in the world to them which is that their relationship with God, have no correlation whatsoever. Are you freaking kidding me?
That that was me at 19, 20. All I was trying to do is navigate this one life they said I was supposed to be stewarding because God said it was so important. Finally, that ends with found some other people my age who are equally furious, and one of the guy is named Gary said, “I hear there's a guy in Colorado. His name is Jean. Jean something. He's supposed to have a clue about this.” And I go, “We got to find Jean.” We find Jean and Jean says and he goes, “Guess what? Work was a pre-fall idea.” Holy cow. Nobody said that was in the brochure.
[00:08:59] JR: Game changer.
[00:09:00] DE: Game changer. So, that's where this began, and I'm hopelessly extroverted storytelling person. I am marketing guy. So, I turned that – just trying to figure my own life out, I turned that into a class called Work and Faith Striving Toward the Integrated Lifestyle. And that caught a couple of churches attention. I'm now running around the Bay Area teaching that class in adult Sunday school, back in the late seventies. Then the university started an attempt to get into the marketplace ministry world which they failed that three times in a row, but nonetheless, so I started speaking at national conferences and off you go. Now, in fact, a couple of years ago, I was at a big conclave in Chicago, where I was on a long list of people who were thanked for being a patriarch of the way, work, and faith movement. So, if you do this long enough, you become a patriarch.
That's where it started. Then, I'm on the first corporate culture committee with Steve Jobs in ‘79. Because the company grew from 800 to 5,000 people the first year I was there, which is kind of fast. They were terrified that you'd wake up and suddenly it would feel like National Semiconductor or IBM, because all these people who weren't us, who don't get it, are overwhelming us. We're intermarrying with people who don't really get Apple at an alarming rate. And Steve was pretty terrified that we would wake up and be some other company and have no way to get back to where we started. So, we formed the corporate culture committee long before corporate culture was even a term, which is where I, at the risk of being fired, told him what the word evangelism meant.
[00:10:21] JR: How'd that go?
[00:10:22] DE: Oh, well, okay, so we're at one of the first meetings, there's 12 people on the committee, I'm far and away the newest guy. Everybody else has their housing on member of the inner circle, but my boss, who was one of those guys dragged me along, and they're all talking about courses and trainings and new employee orientation and posters and stuff. I'm listening to this and kind of going, at one point, I’m just going to go, “This is all really interesting. But none of this is going to work, because you guys are asking the wrong question.” Steve leans and goes, “Okay.” Illuminated a sign, sign. I go, “Well, you're all talking about programming. It's not about programming. It's about evangelism.” Steve goes, “Okay, you got a minute go.”
[00:10:59] JR: Last minute of your life, you're at Apple. Go.
[00:11:01] DE: Yes, let's go. I've been there like three weeks. I am a mechanical engineer that doesn't understand a single thing we're all working on. I just said, “You guys, this is – we’re the culture committee and culture is a relational reality. This is a disease. You don't teach being Apple. You catch it. You can only get it from somebody who's got it. It's person to person. So, if evangelism means giving away that which you are and which you own. What we have to do is come up with ways for the people who've got it to come into contact with people who don't get it, so they can catch the disease. It’s all about getting it. Do you get it?
Then they went, “Oh, got it.” Then, three years later, I'm now EA, and coming to the very, very first ever Apple Software Developer Conference led by Guy Kawasaki, another interesting Christian who you've either shared or probably have already talked with. Guy had had the brand-new business card, which was Software Evan – Apple Software Evangelist. You're the first guy that I know that had the word evangelism on his business card. I don't know for a fact and he and I've had the conversation. I don't know for a fact that his evangelism business card goes all the way back to that day that I nearly got my butt fired, for saying the word in just Steve's presence. But I may have had some contribution to the fact that evangelism was now a business word.
[00:12:13] JR: I love that. So, these days, you are just as well known for this massive book, Design Your Life, written for Christians and non-Christians alike.
[00:12:25] DE: Yes, for people.
[00:12:25] JR: But I think for many Christians, to see it as a “Christian book”, whatever the heck that means, if books could have souls, we got to get to the root of the sacred secular divide, don't we? That's the root of all this. Talk about this for me, because I know you've written a lot about this before.
[00:12:41] DE: Well, it is the fundamental issue. At this point, and the lesson I will often see, it turns out, most Western Christians are much more devotees of Plato and Aristotle than they are of Jesus or Moses, but they don't understand that.
[00:12:53] JR: Yes, so help those who don't understand, understand it here.
[00:12:57] DE: So, when a Christian talks about, well, gosh, I mean, all those guys, I talked to, and there's women that I talked to in the early seventies, who were living the split life, I really feel like I'm with the Lord, when I sang my favorite refrain for the ninth time on Sunday morning, and when I'm sitting in staff meeting, talking about product rollout schedules, it feels pretty secular to me. Then, they actually believe there's a thing called the secular world and there's the sacred world. There's only one world. There is reality, or there isn't.
[00:13:22] JR: There's one world that God has claimed good over every square inch of it.
[00:13:26] DE: Period. Absolutely. I’m very — I concur. Exactly. So, either we're in reality, or we're not. That reality is a place where the ground of being – the mystery we know is God, is what holds everything together and in which we live and move and have our being or is not. God's not a being over here, like a really big one that have been dramatically injects himself into our world every now and then, that makes him a creature, not a creator.
First thing you got to do is upgrade from God the big creature to God the Creator. And that's a real shift for most people philosophically to really understand that. It's often said too many Christians are practicing atheists. I would say, it's more accurate to say too many Christians are practicing deists where God is this big maker of the machines and then stands back and watch it unwind. That's not the way it really works.
In the Platonic world, they were duelist, and a duelist believed that, a Platonic duelist believed that the spiritual world and the material world were fundamentally separate. In fact, even at enmity and hierarchically, the spiritual world was superior because it was truer and purer and more ethereal and more eternal. And the material world was dirty, and messy, and temporary, and really scummy. In fact, one of the ways you knew you were an elite that the gods loved as you were born rich enough to not have to work and have to touch all that material stuff. That's a clear indicator why the coolest job in town is to be a philosopher. Why? Because the most godlike thing I could do in that split cosmology is have an idea.
So, Plato's reflection on the concept of a circle, which is a perfect eye idea. Every single real circle you've ever seen drawn or made, of course, is a crappy garbage implementation of the actual theory of a circle, and an absolutely perfect locus of infinitesimally small points, precisely equidistant from an infinitesimally small place. That concept is gorgeous, beautiful, and eternal, and totally ethereal. It's ethereality is necessary for his eternity, or so they thought. So, you had a duelist.
Now, the Judeo-Christian record and tradition is actually unitivist. There's one world that's spirit inhabited.
[00:15:37] JR: There's no word spiritual in the Old Testament for a reason. Yes.
[00:15:40] DE: Yes, we've been at this for a long, long time. We keep saying, “Oh, you didn't really kick off until Pentecost.” Sorry, go back to Deuteronomy 29 and 30, look at Moses’s concluding sermon before he hands over the baton to Joshua and dies. In his concluding sermon, he says, “The Lord has called me to speak to you to this day to set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life.” So, choose life not death. Apparently, either Moses has given me incredibly obvious counsel, i.e., buy low, sell high. Here's a brilliant financial strategy, Jordan. This will make you wealthy, buy low, sell high. But that's not a strategy. It's a truism. You got life or death. Hey, guys, choose life. I think I knew that before the sermon, Moses, thank you.
Or actually, Moses is really onto something, which means I'm choosing death all the time without even realizing it, and I got to get in front of that thing. Oh, maybe I should go there, and what is Moses say about that? He says, this thing I'm asking of you today is not so hard for you that you can't do it. The Lord hasn't asked you to do something can't do. You don't need to send somebody across the ocean to go find it, and bring it back to you. You don't need to send somebody the top of the mountain like I did that time, if you guys all recall, and bring it back down to you. No, you don't need to do that. This thing, this way of being in the world that God is asking of you, it is so near to you, it is in your mouth, that you might do it. I have this mind among you that was in Christ Jesus.
So, the Christ consciousness, there is a way of being in the world. This is the famous Christian paradox of already and not yet. The fullness of the kingdom, the fullness of the realm of the reality where God is acknowledged is fully present to those who have eyes to see or who can get their tongue around that thing in their mouth that Moses talking about. It’s right there in front of you. Of course, we do not fully realize. The absolute concurrent truth is, it's all available now, and we have a long way to go for it to be fully realized. Both those things are true at the same time. That's where the faith and work thing comes back together, is the joy, is participating in the realization, but we're not making the kingdom. We're just letting it off the leash.
[00:17:39] JR: Yes, we are scratching have glimpses of it, in a kingdom that is both material and spiritual, right? This is critical for the mere Christians listening, because this is what drives me bonkers when I hear pastors say all the time, the only two things that lasts for eternity are God's word and people. I'm sorry, no. A lot of problems with this. Number one, in hermetically diminishes the power of Christ's resurrection. Because in Genesis one, God called the material and the spiritual good. In Genesis three, the curse, Satan, broke everything, material and spiritual, including the material world of work.
So, unless Christ has redeemed all things, all things material and spiritual, then Jesus is a partial loser instead of Lord. And Satan has achieved a partial victory, but he hasn’t. Christ's victory is total, right? And if Christ has redeemed the material world, that has direct implications for the work of mere Christians, because if Christ has redeemed the material world, then working with the material world has intrinsic good to eternal God. Right?
[00:18:43] DE: Absolutely. The way I put it, so when Dave teaches Work in Faith 101, which is overwhelmingly out of the first three pages of the Bible, the pre-fall literature is – because hey, what was it like when it really worked? So, I've got a little hint about that. In fact, there's two slightly overlapping narratives of the creation story. I won't get into all that complexity. But what we find there is that long before the fall, we have workers, and if we have 45 minutes to do the inductive Bible study, we would extract the five attributes from God's design for perfect work, good work is, we are stewards of the world and one another. We are self-sustainers. We participate in our own ongoing sustenance. We are beauty appreciators, tool makers and users, and collaborators. We're in this thing together.
So, if those five attributes characterize the context that God said, “Gee, what I really want to do is have these image bearing creatures that reflect me and want them to experience glorifying me and enjoying me forever.” If you like the Westminster catechism summary of what does it mean to be a human person, which I think is a pretty good shot. In 1636, that many downwardly dressed guys who weren't known as being all that cheerful came up with that as a one liner. The chief end of persons is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. That's a pretty amazing outcome for that conversation. That's what God is inviting us to. Then, God’s sitting around one day in the kitchen and having a cup of coffee thinking, “Huh, so if I really made something, what would work? Oh, I know. I know. I got a great idea. I'm going to let him work. That's so fabulous. Yes, yes, we got to put them the terrarium.”
Think about a little kid making a terrarium. I mean, he's massively anthropomorphize. But God's making a terrarium called reality. What do you think? “Oh, I know. I'll put a stick in there so they can climb up on this stick and have a pen play during recess. Put in the sow bugs.” You watch a kid make a terrarium, so that what happens, they're having a good time. That's what God was doing. That is still available. We are to be reclaiming that. And I think one of the easiest ways you're going to identify the importance, what's important in life, is what got hurt by the fall.
When asked what does it take to have a happy life? Freud, who was not known like me for anything close to a short answer to a hard question, gave a three-word answer, “Liebe und Arbeit”. Love and work. According to Freud, whatever you think about Freud, if you got in love and work, you're good.
Now, if we stick with that, when we look at in the story of the fall, what are the first two places that the wound is felt work and love? The thorns and thistles. Now, the ground will yield with frustration. So, what happens is not that, “Oh, I really want it not to work.” But the whole idea, we are now in a situation where there are these forces that are frustrating and inherent good, so good, noble, healthy work is lovely. But now there's sand in the gears that wasn't there before. So, one of the first places we feel less than the fullness of the reality of God is in what I call the grounds zero. Ground zero of the detonation, when the bomb called the fall went off, first two casualties will work. The other one was in pain in childbirth. I mean, the natural product of intimate love where this mystery called multi-person hooded creatures, I mean, the same guy who made us, also makes bromeliad. Air breathing asexual plants.
I mean, if God wanted the world to be – notice God did not make the world where the way it actually works is, “Oh, honey, don't forget to pick up the manna again today for five minutes and then come back into the house and run the 19-hour Bible study with the kids.” That's not the world God made. Let’s see at the end of the day. That's what we got to get our hands wrapped around, and it really takes a while for people to let that thing go.
[00:22:24] JR: This is the foundation of that question. What should I do with my life? Understanding the creation of goodness of work. But when Christians articulate this question, it's always the Christianist version is, what is God's will for my life? You've written before, I love this quote. You said, “God's will is much more a way than a thing.” Explain what you mean by that.
[00:22:47] DE: Well, my favorite reference here is a lovely book called The Will of God as a Way of Life by Dr. Jerry Sittser. Jerry’s a dear friend. Known for a long, long time. He wrote that a long time ago. It’s the second book he wrote after the worst thing that ever happened to him. First book he wrote was called A Grace Disguised, which is well known, and I think deservedly so is one of, if not the single best books on grief ever written. Because 32 years ago, Jerry knew exactly what the will of God for his life was. He had his MD from Fuller Seminary, he had his PhD in theology under Martin Marty, the wonderful Christian educator at University of Chicago. He had landed his job up at Worth College as a professor of philosophy and religion. He was following God's will for his life beautifully, until coming home from a field trip in his minivan, a drunk jumped the median strip at 80 miles an hour and slammed head on into his car, instantly killing his mother-in-law, his wife, and one of his four kids. And then he didn't know God's will nearly as well as he did before.
So, the first book was the grace book around grief because he had to work through that. And then he said, “Now, I got to write the second book, which is I really don't get how this works. A loving God lets this happen, and I'm pretty sold out on this God thing. Because one of two things is true; God's a jerk or I don't get it.” And Jerry’s conviction was I'm pretty sold out on this God thing. I mean, losing that's going to be really disruptive. I'm going to go with I don't get it as long as I possibly can before I give up. He kind of went back to the root. And actually, the most inspirational book he read that inspired his next idea was Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean Pierre De Caussade, one of those little skinny books by an old dead mystic, which I strongly recommend to people.
Then, he wrote this largely out of the sermon on the mount, and realized, “Oh, the will of God isn't some blue line on a map for an itinerary like there's one right answer to your life. That's not it at all.”
[00:24:40] JR: The Mr. Right equivalent of vocation, right?
[00:24:43] DE: Exactly. What he calls the conventional understanding is there is an image, there is a specification on the refrigerator under a magnet, in heaven with your life on it, and includes marrying Mary Jane or Alan and Alan's on the 332 train, and you played one more round of Tetris, and you caught the 348 and Susie's not on the 348. She's on the 332. You're supposed to marry Susie, and now you're stuck with Alice. Oh, well, Alice isn't bad. I guess, we'll just go with Alice.
That's the way most Christians think heaven actually works and it's absolutely nuts. Not just really in the design version of – because Designing Your Life is nothing more than the Christian doctrine of vocational discernment reframed through the lens of design thinking. My line about that is, if Jesus is the second Adam, as Scripture tells us he is, the fundamental call of faith is to become fully human. So, the nickname of the real technical name of design thinking, the methodology upon which the book is based, is human centered design. My partner is indeed a Nietzsche loving atheist. But we agree on the anthropology. If you get the human part right, you can't go wrong.
So, anything fully human is fully word God is – my atheist partner, by the way, is not a nihilist or a materialist, he is a mystery appreciating atheist. We say that the only real difference is when we hit mystery Bill rounds down, and Dave rounds up, and he finally has accepted that distinction. But nonetheless, if we're trying to become fully human, we're all frankly on the same path. That's how we ended up here. I think the whole idea of God's asking us to be a certain – to live a certain way, the first century Christians were called followers in the way. The term Christian was like Jesus freak. It was a slang. I was like the N word, frankly, assigned to Christians, to the people of the faith by the Romans. So, we've adopted that term.
Unfortunately, particularly in evangelicalism, ended up thinking that the idea of Christianity, oh, that's a Greek concept again. The whole – it's all about – I mean, quickly, let's go on all the passages where Jesus says one more time, got all the disciples sitting at desks, working on editing their statement of faith. Oh, there aren't any. Now, I'm not saying those statements of faith aren't important, but they're not the centrality. The lived experience is. So, there you go.
[00:27:01] JR: It's who we're becoming. It is conforming to the image of Christ and becoming truly human. If that's true, if that's the goal, if that's God's will, is for us to walk in the way of Christ, then the thing we do while we're becoming is far less important, right? That's both freeing and paralyzing, because now, almost every career is an option for honoring God, and for doing the will of God. So, where does that leave us? How do we choose?
[00:27:30] DE: But that's exactly the issue. This is so – once I got around the corner, that there's not the black and white question of are you doing the right thing? No, you're not. All of Heaven is wringing their hands going, “Oh, God, no, you missed the train.” Once you get over that nonsense, how do I explain, well, what are you left with? What you're left with, frankly, is such an incredibly, amazing, complicated, elegant and beautiful thing that most people just can't get their heads wrapped around it.
Because what's going on here is, I’m a freewill affirming Christian, that we have a degree of what Kuyper would call domain sovereignty, and so we have some power. Now, most of life happens to you. I mean, we don't create outcomes. We create responses to reality. But nonetheless, we have some agency here. Well, I could have gone down that marine biology pathway. I could have stayed at Apple and not gone to Electronic Arts. I could have not taught that class at Cal when they invited me to. I have choices.
Now, what's going on there? So, the conviction I have is when you're up against an important choice, and you've got three alternatives in front of you. Door number one, two, and three, and try as you might to get some guidance from God. Now, there are times you get some guidance from God and he goes, “Yes, it's door number three. I really think you're going to go over here.” I'm not saying God doesn't invite us. The invitation is encountered. I've had lots of those experiences. I teach them, just ran a five-hour discernment seminar two weeks ago.
So, once you get around the corner of there's no simple answer, once you're inside of this incredibly large domain called the noble possibilities, it's a really big, highly optioned, Greenfield. Holy cow, now, what do I do? That's where this question of discernment comes in. I think the power tool, the superpower you want to ask for, if you got a choice is discernment. John 5:19, the son can do only what the father shows him, or as my mentor says, Jesus, the least creative man who ever lived, is follow, follow, follow every darn day. So, how do you do that following thing? That's the challenge. And that's where discernment comes in.
[00:29:23] JR: And the Designing Your Life framework is a process of vocational discernment. Right? It's based on design thinking. For those who aren't familiar with that term, explain design thinking and then apply it to these vocational choices that we have.
[00:29:38] DE: Sure. So, the easiest way to understand design thinking/human centered design is to distinguish it from other kinds of thinking. So, there's engineering thinking, where we solve our way forward. I have a couple of engineering degrees. There are right answers. You can get the equation. You can build the bridge. You can know the strength modulus of steel and you can build that thing and it will work every time. Working on what we call tame problems and tame problems might be hard like cold fusion. Okay, cold fusion is a tame problem, really hard, when we haven't quite solved yet, actually, made big progress on it last year. But that's still a tame problem. Because once you crack that sucker, you got it and you know how to make it work.
So, that's engineering thinking. By the way, my premise is, or my thesis is, it's the overwhelmingly most popular way to think these days, everybody thinks there's a right answer to every question, because we are so surrounded by a technological world we are so accustomed to there is a solution, including to my life. But it’s a very powerful capacity, and it only solves certain kinds of problems. You got business thinking, where you’re never right, you’re never done, but you can optimize. You can be more profitable, and more green, and more ecological, and more diverse, and your customer can love you more, but you're never done. So, you optimize your way forward.
A bureaucratic organization, you can be more process oriented. Your process can be more effective and more efficient, because you're bureaucratic. So, you process your way forward. In research, you analyze your way forward. You come up with ways of thinking, identifying new ideas, and we give you this goofy coat with three stripes on it, and a funny looking hat, and call you a doctor, that means you're a knowledge creator, because you've learned how to analyze a certain kind of way. So, whether I'm solving, or processing, or optimizing, or analyzing, these are really powerful ways of thinking, and they're different from design thinking where we build our way forward. Or if I want to put that in more Christian language, I walk my way forward.
What that means is there's an empirical process, or an orthopraxy, to use the technical term, not an orthodoxy, where I live into the reality. There's an old line that says, “God often comes to us disguised as our lives.” Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. God actually liked Jesus better over time. Wait a minute, how's that work? How does perfect get better? Well, it depends which way you define perfect. We can come back to that if you want.
So, that's that lived experience in moving forward. Design thinking is an innovation methodology for coming up with solutions to wicked problems, the ones for which an engineering solution isn't readily available, and usually we're talking about this thing we've never done before called the future. So, we have no data. You can't analyze anything. There's no data in the future yet, to us who are stuck with the arrow of time. So, you try stuff, and you iterate products so you have ideas. It starts with empathy, first of all, deeply listen to what's going on. Step one is empathy. Really understand what's happening, i.e. love it the way God loves it. See it the way God loves it.
Contemplation, according to Thomas Merton is taking a long and loving look at the real. If you saw everything the way God sees it, without all your biases and preconceived notions about the right thing that needs to be done here, then you would learn how to love it. So, you start with a compassionate, a contemplative look of reality, which designers call empathy. Then, you define what you're working on. What problem have I found? You problem find before you problem solve, the overwhelming problem with Christian projects is they get everything going for it but Christ. I don't know about you, it looks to me like God's version of bringing the kingdom into the fullness of realization is going on a lot slower schedule than I would be, it would be if I were running the program, and I keep raising my hand, and God hasn’t called me on that yet.
But things are going a lot slower than I would put up with, which means there are plenty of things that deserve to be done. But maybe God hasn't started yet. So, how can you detect where God is active, not merely deserving. That's a definition problem. So, you problem find, and then, well, what are we going to do now, guys? Now we have ideas. So, I'm going to cultivate the sacred imagination. I'm going to co-collaborate the Spirit of God to come up with stuff. So, like James, in the book of Acts, it seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit. Then, the letter goes on about what we're going to do the churches outside of Jerusalem.
How do you get to that place where it seems good to us and the Holy Spirit? Oh, how is God your ideation partner? And then, do you take those ideas and before you over commit prematurely, let's go try them a little bit before we hurt people. We call that having a design. And Tod Bolsinger, the Executive Vice President of Fuller Seminary, we’re having coffee at the coffee house in Stanford many years ago, and he was going, “Gosh, Dave, I've really been trying to figure out why we get along so well. We fell madly in like with each other, almost on contact, and it’s kind of strange. I thought it was weird. I just don't get it.” I go, “Well, I don't really need to figure it out, Tod. I'm happy with the fact that we get along, if that's okay with you.” No one wanted to figure it out. I did. I figured it out because design thinking and practical theology, there's a systematic approach to theology called practical theology. It's a technical term. He said they're identical. They just use different words. It is this empirical evolutionary process of uncovering what it is God is doing the world by walking through it methodolo – is really a bottom up methodology of empiricism, because God is a lived experience, not an idea. So, that's the semester course in about three minutes.
[00:34:54] JR: I love it. Guys, I can't recommend the book, Designing Your Life highly enough to help you unpack that question.
[00:35:03] DE: By the way, there's a 14-page white paper called The Christian Companion to Designing Your Life.
[00:35:07] JR: It's phenomenal, and we're going to link to in the show notes. It's so good.
[00:35:10] DE: All that stuff that, if you haven't got it, I can get it to you, and your listener, or you, download stuff for your listeners. But that's a public document readily available. It's not on the Designing Your Life website, because that website's not in the theology business. But it's readily available and happy to have everybody get a copy if they want to.
[00:35:23] JR: Yes, we're definitely going to link to it in the show notes. It's a terrific read. I do want to talk about the dark side of this, what should I do with my life question? Because I think for some people, this question can be code for what should I do with my life to prove my worth and significance to the world? Right? I know, that's what I really meant by that question early in my career. How can we Christians be freed from the less than God honoring subtext of that question?
[00:35:52] DE: I think it's a very challenging question. So, again, we already did the shorthand version of the 45-minute inductive Bible study on God's design for work out of Genesis. And now we're going to do the shorthand version of the hour and a half Bible study on God's definition of success, which I teach out of Ecclesiastes. A book that most people can't stand for a long reason we won't get into.
If you look at Ecclesiastes, there are two voices in the books. One author who we think will Hollis the poet, we believe to be Solomon, pretty wise guy. There's all this whining and complaining. “Man, blah, blah, blah. Life sucks.” All this vanity and chasing after win is just poetic Hebrew for life sucks.
For example, there's a line that decision of what is crooked cannot be made straight and what is lacking cannot be numbered. I've seen that this is a vanity and chasing after win, life sucks. Okay, and there are a whole bunch of them. I've now actually – I've sorted Ecclesiastes into the Westerners version, because Ecclesiastes is written in a circular manner, goes back and forth all the time. Sounds like the guy's a manic depressive, and he's off his meds, like he's just flip flopping back and forth, like what's going on here? So, I sorted the book. I've got the linearized version of Ecclesiastes, and all the similar messages piled into Dave's new revised chapter headings, and this one is all these complaints. And they're all complaints about people trying to make a meaningful life work and they fail.
So, I go, “Oh, well, if we could codify the list of definitive failed life organizing objectives, thoughtful people thought maybe if I organize my life this way, it will work. Oh, I did, and it failed. Shoot, now what I do?” But the promises are very poetic. So, that one, what's crooked cannot be made straight. What's lacking cannot be numbered. Okay, what were you trying to do that failed that caused you to make that complaint? Well, what's crooked cannot be made straight. Well, who’s straightening crooked stuff? What are you talking about? I’m problem solving. The problems are – there's an infinite supply of problems and some of them are insoluble. I thought if I fixed enough stuff, my life would work.
But here's what I found. You can't get there from here. So, my life sucks. And then even weirder, what's lacking cannot be numbered. I mean, who goes around being overwhelmed by noticing what's not available? What's lacking cannot be number. The enumerability of lacks, has that ever accosted you? Who's got that on their mind? He's talking about resource allocation. Hey, we don't have a water problem in the world, we have a water distribution problem. We don’t have a food problem in the world, it’s food distribution. Fifty percent of prepare food and restaurants is thrown away. Are you kidding me? This is a distribution problem, and it's making me freaking nuts.
What I'm noticing is I can't get there from here. So, here's a really noble thing, if I could just get stuff where it belongs, and the lacking was now numbered down to a manageable compromise, I would feel like my life worked, but I can't get there. So, if you actually go through all the book of Ecclesiastes, we would come out with eight or nine of these things, and the whole list of things that people pursued as a life worthwhile organizing version of their success is a very contemporary list.
I think the theme that combines all eight or nine of them, which enumerate, is production. They're outcome oriented. I fixed it, I sold it, I shipped it, I saved it, I rescued it, whatever it is, I got it done. I produced the desired outcome. Then, there's this other voice – and all those guys failed. A bunch of them were very noble things. Then, there's this other voice, but what I have seen, is to enjoy the wife of your youth and the meal before you, and people think that's the consolation prize. Well, life sucks, but at least I got the free dinner. That's not it. I think what he's really saying is, I have seen a completely different way of being in the world and those people seem to have a very different experience.
Blessed are they who have wealth and power, wealth and possessions, and the power to enjoy them for they will not much remember the length of their days having been preoccupied with joy in their hearts. How do you get to be that guy, where literally, old man death taps you on the shoulder says, “Dave, it's time to go.” What? It's time to go. You're naïve. Really? I just lost track of time. I was having such a good time. That's what's the normative experience of the faithful person is supposed to be. Really? How does that work? And what you find in the admonition for that incredibly different voice is the G word. There are three Gs that show up that are in none of the complaints. And those Gs are gift, gratitude, and God. And for the people who recognize that the gift of life lived gratefully from God, I do have that.
I can't promise you the outcome, but I can promise you the opportunity to participate. So, if you're going to receive the gift of life with gratefulness from God, and recognize you got it from God, not from yourself, that might be the pathway to joy. So, what does that look like? What would I do if I was trying to gratefully receive the gift of life? Oh, maybe that aliveness in me couldn't stand to do anything other than act like God, and get out there, and co-participate. I would probably solve problems and reallocate resources and get stuff done. I would do all that stuff everybody else is doing, by the way, not forgotten your question, what's the difference?
The difference about that outcome orientation about, “Man, I've needed to design a meaningful life that changes the world.” No, you don't, actually. What you need to do, and I just was on the panel at the close of the Praxis innovation conference last week on failure, talking about reframing failure, because this is a huge problem, 400 entrepreneurs in the room like we had talked about this.
The issue is I get to, one idea is on the production or in person, I'm okay, because of what I got done today. My life justifies my legitimacy. Or because I am okay and beloved of God, I'm invited to go out into the field of the Lord and play with God and God's people and everybody else to, and participate in this thing called making the world, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. And when it does, we have a party. And when it doesn't, we have a wake and is broken – and our heart breaks, but we aren't broken.
So, the fundamental difference is, is what you're doing during the day justifying your legitimacy, or expressing your belovedness? It's probably the same behavior, but the mindset and the consciousness are radically different, and that's what we're called to do. What we told 400 entrepreneurs last week was, “You're not called to success or failure. You're called to participate and to obedience, and sometimes success is a place we get to go with God. And sometimes failure is a place we go with God. But it's all about God. It's not about win; it's about God.”
[00:42:38] JR: So good. Perfectly said. That may have been the best translation of Ecclesiastes I've ever heard. Dave, three questions we wrap up every conversation with real quickly. Number one, which books do you find yourself gifting most frequently to other people other than your own?
[00:42:52] DE: Yeah, probably my short list of preferred would include Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen. And Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer. More recently, Mindsight by Dan Siegel about human consciousness, which is pretty interesting. Those are my top three I know.
[00:43:07] JR: Daniel Siegel is brilliant. Hey, who would you want to hear on this podcast talking about how the gospel shapes the work of mere Christians in the world?
[00:43:14] DE: Bryan Stevenson.
[00:43:15] JR: Okay. It's a good name.
[00:43:17] DE: Equal Justice Initiative.
[00:43:18] JR: Yes, that's good. What's one thing from our conversation you want to reiterate to our listeners, before we sign off, Dave?
[00:43:24] DE: There is not one right answer to your life. Every single moment of every single day is surrounded by invitation. Whichever invitation – and there may be some, where God has an intent for you, and you miss it. That's okay. We call it grace. Then, because God still agrees with the degree of autonomy he's gifted you, God accepts God's own decision about who you are as a person. Once you choose something, God is in it with you, and then the new invitation starts from there, because we're in this place called reality. We worship the God of is, not the God of should. So, God is with you.
The key thing to remember is the two prisoners on either side of Jesus on the cross defined two different Jesus. One guy says, “If you're the Messiah, get us the heck out of here.” That's the fix it Jesus. Is Jesus your superhero that will fix it? The other guy says, “Remember me.” And he says, “I'll be with you today in paradise.” You've got the with me Jesus, or the fix it Jesus. The real one is the with me. So, the key thing to remember is, God just wants to be with you on the walk. It's not about get it right. It's about get it with.
[00:44:34] JR: Yes, it's so good. Dave, I want to commend you for the extraordinary work you've done. You are a patriarch of this faith of workspace and I, and many other people by extension have been beneficiaries of that. Thank you for reminding us of the freedom that we have in Christ, to just walk with God, in the good works that he's prepared in advance for us to do which is pretty much anything we put our hands to, for His glory and the good of others.
Guys, go check out Dave's terrific book, Designing Your Life. We'll make sure to link to the Christian companion to the book in the show notes. Dave, thanks for hanging out with us today.
[00:45:06] DE: Thank you, Jordan. Take care.
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[00:45:09] JR: Man, that conversation blew my mind. Blew my mind. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Hey, if you did, do me a favor, go leave a review of the Mere Christians Podcast, wherever you're listening to the show, and I'll see you next week.
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