SHOW NOTES
In this powerful conversation, entrepreneur Josef Schmidt shares his journey from financial success to founding Freedom United, an anti-human trafficking organization that influenced UN policy. Dr. Dave and Joe dive deep into the difference between mediocrity and excellence in Christian calling, challenging the idea that faith means simply “checking boxes” rather than becoming the best version of yourself.
They discuss why so many Christians use their calling as an excuse for average work, the problem with fear-based Christian marketing, and Joe’s profound “three emoji” understanding of God’s love. This raw, honest discussion redefines what it means to live out your purpose with stellar effort, not perfect outcomes.
Stop Using Your Calling as an Excuse for Mediocrity: Lessons from Joe Schmidt
I had the privilege of sitting down with Joe Schmidt, successful entrepreneur and founder of Freedom United, on The R7 Christian Marketing Podcast. What started as a conversation about calling and purpose turned into one of the most challenging discussions I’ve had about what it really means to live out your faith with excellence.
As someone who has spent over a decade helping Christians discover their purpose through the R7 process, I’ve seen countless people use their “calling” as a shield against mediocrity. But Joe’s journey, from failed entrepreneur battling anxiety and depression to influencing UN policy on modern slavery, reveals a different path entirely.
His message is uncomfortable but necessary: God doesn’t judge you by your outcomes. But He absolutely cares about the stellar quality of your effort.
The Real Definition of Calling
When I asked Joe point-blank what “calling” actually means, his answer surprised me.
“It doesn’t matter at this point,” he said. “You know, this is where you’re at. This is your passion. Let’s roll with it. Let’s build a vision around it. Let’s put some strategy behind it. Let’s put some rigor into it and let’s go after it.”
Whether you were born with a passion or developed it through dysfunction and pain, that’s not the point. The question is: Are you sitting on your gifts or stewarding them with excellence?
Joe distinguishes between learning a skill to get paid versus discovering what you’d do for free. That passion you can’t stop investigating, the thing you’d spend crazy amounts of time on and become an expert in… that’s closer to calling than any job description ever will be.
But here’s where it gets uncomfortable: 88% of Americans are disengaged at work. Why? Because we go to school, learn a skill, get paid for that skill, and wonder why we feel empty. We confuse career with calling, and then use “calling” as an excuse to stay comfortable.
The Parable That Changes Everything
Joe keeps coming back to Matthew 25, the parable of the five talents. You know the story: A master gives three servants money to invest. Two double their investment. One buries his out of fear.
The servant who buried his talent didn’t lose the money. He just didn’t try. And the consequence? “Weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
“The dilemma becomes: what should the outcomes be?” Joe explains. “I think they should be equaling your abilities that He’s given you.”
This is the tension: God doesn’t measure outcomes. But He absolutely expects you to match your effort to your abilities.
Joe was sitting on financial resources, entrepreneurial experience, and the ability to start things. Starting a neighborhood watch, while good, didn’t match his capabilities. It wasn’t adequate to the talents entrusted to him.
The question isn’t: “What can I do comfortably?” The question is: “What matches the abilities God gave me?”
The Three-Emoji Gospel
One of the most powerful moments in our conversation came when Joe shared how his 21-year-old daughter explained God to a skeptical friend at a bar.
She said: “I think of God just like I think of my dad. And I’ve got a good dad. I know that my dad is Team Addison always. And I know that all my dad wants to see me do is strive to do my best. My dad is not worried about when I fail. He’s not worried about when I fall short. All he wants to do is see me try.”
Then she added: “I take that, but then I turn it into a father that is not fallible like mine. My father in heaven is just like my dad, but on an epic scale. And when I screw up, he loves me just as much as he did before I screwed up. It’s not even a blip on his scale of love.”
Joe was blown away. And here’s why: The young woman said she’d never heard this before.
Think about that. After decades of Christian messaging, this basic truth (that God is cheering for you, loves you no matter what, and just wants to see you try) felt revolutionary.
Joe distilled it even further into what he calls his “three emoji understanding of God”:
Smiley face. Frowny face. Straight face (meh).
Every day, God sends a text with one emoji based on your effort. Not your outcome. Your effort. And here’s the crucial part: “There’s always love in the emoji.”
The Eaglet Principle: Becoming Who God Created You to Be
I shared a story with Joe that has become one of my favorite illustrations of the gospel.
My former VP, Jason, was a bird watcher. One day we were looking out his office window at a bunch of birds in the parking lot. Among them was this gangly, awkward, ugly bird that didn’t fit in.
“What kind of bird is that?” I asked.
“That’s an eaglet,” Jason said. “It hasn’t figured out what God has called it to do yet. When it does, it will become an eagle. It’ll fly majestically through the air and swoop down and catch a fish.”
That will preach.
Here’s the PhD-level good news: God created you in His image so you can become the best version of yourself and glorify Him with your talents and abilities.
The eagle doesn’t need to open Malachi 3:10 and calculate its tithe. It doesn’t look at the alligator and wish it could swim. It doesn’t seek approval from other animals.
It just does what God intended it to do. And in doing so, it glorifies its Creator.
That’s the good news. Not checking boxes. Not saying the right prayers. Not even believing all the right theology. It’s becoming who you were created to be and flying with everything you’ve got.
The UN Moment: When God Shows Up
Joe’s story of Freedom United illustrates what happens when you stop holding yourself small and start matching your effort to your abilities.
After going through the R7 process in 2013, Joe committed to fighting modern slavery. Thirteen years later, he found himself standing in the United Nations building with 300 people he’d rallied, watching a minister slam down a petition with 250,000 signatures and declare: “Freedom United is watching us.”
“There is no way in hell that I had anything to do with any of this,” Joe told me, tears in his eyes at the memory. “It’s literally not possible.”
That vote passed unanimously. For the first time ever, the UN deployed peacekeepers into the Middle East specifically to find people trapped in slavery by ISIS. Tens of thousands were rescued.
Joe (an “e-commerce guy from Indiana” who didn’t even know where Afghanistan was) had influenced global policy.
How? “I kept saying yes. I kept pushing. I kept progressing. I kept accepting the fact that I was scared to death of everything.”
This is the level above even the PhD understanding of the gospel: You’re not just living to your potential. You’re living beyond it, to places only God could take you.
Faith Requires Doubt
Here’s where Joe gets theologically uncomfortable (and profoundly right):
“In order to have faith, you must have doubt.”
The Bible defines faith as “being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see.” By definition, if there’s no doubt to overcome, it’s not faith. It’s just knowledge.
“I wake up every morning and decide that I’m going to continue believing in Jesus Christ,” Joe explained. “I could argue with somebody that God isn’t real. I could actually do a pretty good job of it.”
But here’s his secret: He’s put himself in situations where God had to show up.
“If you never get out there and you never give Him space to show up because you just sit in comfort, then I don’t know, man, that’s a hard sell. It’s a hard sell for me to just be basing all of my faith on what other people are telling me.”
Faith isn’t believing provable things. Faith is choosing to believe despite doubt, and then getting way out on the limb so God can prove Himself real.
The Marketing Problem with Christianity
Both Joe and I agree: Christian messaging is broken.
We tell people about a Jewish guy who died, rose from the dead, and floats around as a spirit in their heart. Then we act surprised when they need a minute to process whether we’re “whack.”
Worse, we’ve based most Christian marketing on judgment and fear. The subtext of every gospel presentation is: “By the way, if you don’t believe this, you’re going to burn in hell for all of eternity. But I’m not judging you.”
As Joe puts it: “How do we get around never judging while trying to present that there’s one ultimate truth and if you don’t believe it then bad things are going to happen to you? Because that’s judgment.”
Meanwhile, we’re packaging messages like “it’s not what you do, it’s what He did,” which completely contradicts Jesus’s actual teaching.
90% of Christ’s message was about what we do: Do good stuff. Be a good person. Go help people. Love people.
It IS about what we do. Just not in the “earn your salvation” way. In the “are you bringing stellar effort to the talents you’ve been given” way.
Letting Go: The Golf Swing Principle
I shared with Joe my golf analogy that perfectly captures why so many of us stay mediocre:
I can hit my driver 235 yards consistently with a controlled swing. But to get to 265 yards, I have to bring the club head way above my head, to the point where I can’t control it anymore.
I have to let go. Trust the process. Give up control.
Nine times out of ten, it works. But my pride fights it every time. “What if I let go and it goes wrong? I can’t do this. I’ve got to hold on.”
That’s exactly what keeps us from championship living.
Joe was born with very little inhibition. He just doesn’t care what most people think. And biblically, that’s accurate. Jesus said if you love God, people might not like you very much.
But for the rest of us? We have to practice letting go. We have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. We have to get way out on the limb where we can’t succeed without God showing up.
The Donor-Advised Fund Scandal
Here’s a statistic that will blow your mind: The Fidelity 501(c)(3) donor-advised fund holds billions of dollars that people have already committed to give away. These donors can never get the money back. It can only go to nonprofits.
Yet less than half a percent gets deployed each year.
Tens of thousands of people have said, “I want to give this money away,” taken the tax write-off, and then… just sit on it.
Why? Joe thinks it’s because they’re not engaged enough in anything to trust deploying the capital. They’re so wrapped up in outcomes instead of action that they’re missing the entire point.
They’re burying their talent.
You can have all the resources in the world, but if you don’t deploy them with stellar effort, you’re the servant in Matthew 25.
The Rigor of R7: Finding Your Sweet Spot
When Joe went through the R7 process with me back in 2013, he was financially secure but directionless. He’d sold a company and had resources to deploy, but the options were overwhelming.
“When the sky’s the limit, it’s hard to figure out what part of the sky you want to shoot for,” he admitted.
We explored multiple options: prison ministry, homelessness, hunger. Joe had done work in the prison system and was passionate about recidivism rates and racial disparities.
But we kept coming back to one thing: modern slavery.
It wasn’t even his biggest passion at the start. But through the process of evaluation, vision-building, and strategic thinking (the rigor), it became clear this was where his time, talent, and treasure should go.
Thirteen years later, that decision has impacted millions of lives.
That’s the power of intentional process over vague calling.
What Champions Do Differently
So what separates champions from people who use calling as an excuse?
1. Champions are intentional about where they’re out on the limb.
They don’t just pick comfortable battles. They pick battles that match their capabilities and require God to show up.
2. Champions focus on effort, not outcomes.
Joe’s daughter nailed it: God doesn’t judge the outcomes. He wants to see you try. Bring stellar effort, not perfect results.
3. Champions decide to believe every single day.
Faith isn’t a one-time decision. It’s waking up every morning and choosing to believe despite doubt, despite evidence, despite circumstances.
4. Champions let go.
They get comfortable being uncomfortable. They bring the golf club way above their head and trust the process.
5. Champions get way out on the limb.
They put themselves in positions where they literally cannot succeed without divine intervention. That’s where faith becomes fact.
Your Next Step
Here’s Joe’s challenge: Stop sandbagging.
Are you matching your effort to your abilities? Or are you hiding behind “calling” while delivering mediocre work?
Are you out on the limb where God has to show up? Or are you sitting in comfort basing your faith on what other people tell you?
Are you burying your talent out of fear? Or are you deploying it with stellar effort regardless of the outcome?
You don’t have to know your calling to start. You just have to stop making excuses and start bringing excellence to what’s in front of you.
Start small. Stop eating the French fries of mediocrity. Take one step toward the limb. Choose one area where you’ll bring stellar effort this week.
Because here’s the truth: God’s not going to judge you by whether you succeeded. He’s going to judge you by whether you tried with everything you had.
And every day, you get a new emoji. The question is: What emoji will you earn tomorrow?
The R7 process helps Christian leaders and marketers discover their purpose and build actionable strategy around their calling. If you’re ready to stop using calling as an excuse and start living with championship-level intentionality, tune in to The R7 Christian Marketing Podcast for more faith-driven conversations about excellence in business and ministry.
Remember: Eagles don’t seek approval. They just fly. What’s keeping you grounded?
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