By: Laura Bennett
Have you ever felt torn between pursuing your dream vocation or prioritising the crafts that light you up, and carrying the weight of adult and family responsibilities?
Somehow our society has become fixated on the idea that rarely can you combine the two and, if you put obligations first, your passions will always fall by the wayside.
Tauren Wells is a 10-time Grammy nominated and multiple Dove Award winning recording artist and multi-instrumentalist, who started out as a founding member of pop group Royal Tailor before going solo in 2017 with his hit Love is Action.
Speaking about the release of his new album Joy in the Morning, Tauren said we don’t need to be disheartened by that division, we need to look at it differently.
“There are two dimensions to it, one side is where you’ve got this beautiful opportunity to find the place where your passion and the marketplace collide, and to funnel that into something that takes care of you and takes care of your family,” Tauren said.
“Don’t buy into the train of thought that something has to be consumed to be valuable.”
“I would also caution people though, to not buy into the train of thought that something has to be consumed to be valuable – that something has to have a price tag on it to be worth something.
“We all have things that we love [that] we may never get paid for, but that do so much good for our soul and our mind and our heart. [They] serve an incredible purpose in helping us process our emotions, our feelings, our lives and really giving something tangible to them.
“If what you love to do isn’t something that can make you money, don’t stop doing it just because it doesn’t.”
Refining His Personal Mission
For more a decade, Tauren has been refining the personal mission behind his own life and creative endeavours and said while “it has evolved and developed over time”, it’s also quite simple.
“My [life mission] is to call greatness out of others,” he said.
“It’s bigger than music, it’s more than communication. [Our “why”] is bigger than that function that we serve every day.”
[Our “why”] is bigger than that function that we serve every day,” – Tauren Wells
In his marriage to wife Lorna, Tauren learned early on that having that sense of personal mission was vital to the health of their relationship.
“We quickly realised we really needed to know who we were as individuals, and that we were not each other’s source,” he said. “Culture has been telling us our entire lives that you really aren’t anyone unless you have someone significant, or if you are not someone [significant] to someone else, and I think we carried that into our marriage.
“My wife speaks very openly about it. [As much] as she loved Jesus and followed Jesus, I had become a source for her of joy and all of that, and vice versa.
“(Our spouses) are people that God has placed in each other’s lives to benefit, and help and come alongside, but we cannot be the foundation.”
“She was a source of security and confidence for me, when really, we’re just resources. We’re people that God has placed in each other’s lives to benefit, and help and come alongside, but we cannot be the foundation.”
As he takes his mission of calling out greatness in others to listeners of his new album, Tauren said “the hope is that when people hear this album, they see the horizon”.
“We have been in dark times, there’s been some difficult things that we have all journeyed through over the past 24 months, and I just want to remind people that the sun still rises, morning still comes.
“I don’t want people to listen to my album to get away from their life, I want them to listen to it to maybe re-enter their lives for the first time [and] allow the gospel to come alive in it,” he said.
Tauren Wells’ album Joy in the Morning is out now.
Article supplied with thanks to Hope Media.
Feature image: Tauren Wells / Facebook
