Many Hats, One Purpose

A glimpse into my journey of learning to live a fully-integrated life

The story of my life follows a well-worn path. I was born into a Christian home, where church on Sundays was a given. Both my parents worked, and my siblings and I applied ourselves to school and extracurriculars. After high school came college, then a vocation and marriage.

I suspect much of this might sound familiar, even if you need to change or rearrange the pieces a bit.

Once the main pieces are in place, next, you begin to learn the skill of wearing different hats. When you wake up, maybe you put on the health hat. During the day, the work or homemaking hat. In the evening, the spouse or parent hat. On Sundays, the Christian hat. About ten years into this journey, I added two additional hats: church elder and business owner.

Bigger Questions

While many of these roles felt good and right, I couldn’t help but ask myself: What is my life really about? Was there a common thread running through it all, or was I simply doing my best in the different spheres where the Lord had placed me? Was my purpose just to be a good coworker, a good business owner, a good family man, and a good Christian—or was there something deeper tying it all together?

A number of years ago, I came across this quote by Charles Spurgeon. It was so striking, particularly because I had rarely heard a message like this inside the walls of a church.

"To a man who lives unto God nothing is secular, everything is sacred. He puts on his workday garment and it is a vestment to him. He sits down to his meal and it is a sacrament. He goes forth to his labor, and therein exercises the office of the priesthood. His breath is incense and his life a sacrifice. He sleeps on the bosom of God, and lives and moves in the divine presence.

The Lord hath cleansed your houses, he has cleansed your bed chambers, your tables, your shops, he has made the bells upon your horses holiness to the Lord, he has made the common pots and pans of your kitchens to be as the bowls before the altar, if you know what you are and live according to your high calling.

You housemaids, you cooks, you nurses, you ploughmen, you housewives, you traders, you sailors, your labor is holy if you serve the Lord Christ in it, by living unto him as you ought to live. The sacred has absorbed the secular." - C. H. Spurgeon

This sounds different from what most of us have been taught. Too often, well-meaning pastors imply that we bring the most glory to God when we’re wearing our “church” hat—serving in ministry, going to church, sharing the gospel. In other words, pastor-like work is the only work considered truly sacred. But Spurgeon saw a deeper truth in God’s Word: purpose isn’t found by squeezing more sacred into our lives, but seeing all of life as sacred.

Bigger Promises

This shift in perspective opened up a worldview that no longer saw life as a collage of disjointed roles, but as a single tapestry woven together by a sacred purpose: bringing glory to God. If God intends every aspect of our lives to be sacred, then perhaps His Word shows us what that life is meant to look like, and His Spirit empowers us to live it out with boldness and strength.

For the past decade, the Lord has been leading me on a journey of discovering that a fully integrated life is not just available to us in Him — it was His original design from the beginning. The heart behind starting this Substack is to share what I am learning (and continue to learn) with anyone feeling the same tension or searching for the same answers.

The purposes and power of God are not reserved for super-Christians or those doing super-Christian things. They are available at all times, to everyone who follows Jesus. In Him, ordinary disciples can be empowered to do astonishing things — just as it was once said about two ordinary fishermen:

“When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.” Acts 4:13