A balanced life?
Is that the goal? How do you achieve balance with your time, priorities and purpose? There is so much to do and so many responsibilities: keeping up work or ministry demands, not to mention growing the ministry and moving it forward. There is family, health, recreation, personal growth and development…I get tired just thinking of all the demands. How can one balance it all?
Good question. I believe balance is a myth. But that doesn’t mean that you have no choice but to resign yourself to living out of balance and running on empty.
In their book, Co-Active Coaching, the authors point out that we have more choices than we think we do. Perhaps the first step is to recognize that for everything new you say “yes” to, there needs to be a corresponding “no” that you say to something else. The point is that if you are not intentional about it, you will probably end up unconsciously saying “no” to your family, your health, your spiritual health or something else.
So what do you do?
As the authors say, “balance is a fluid state because life itself is dynamic…” So true. So a better goal can be that your life will be “tending” toward balance rather than seeking balance as the end goal in itself. Ministry has seasons of great demands and busyness like Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, times of death and funerals with people to care for and services to offer. Then there are other times when the days are less filled and less demanding. Wisdom would recognize that one can flex with those changes and manage the demands knowing things will not always be so busy. Taking care of one’s self and family during those slower times can be pursued with true disengagement, joy and fulfillment without guilt, while ministry demands can be pursued with great focus and determination without guilt at other times.
It’s about awareness, clarity, choice and intentionality mixed in. Then when one is also determined to empower others for ministry, you won’t be under the guilt or delusion of thinking that you are the only indispensible one who can get it done. But that is another blog, actually a previous one.
Coaching Questions:
- Are you tending toward balance or away from balance? What are you focusing on? Are you observing appropriate boundaries? Are you engaging and disengaging appropriately?
- What are you intentionally saying “yes” to and “no” to?
- What “seasons” do you need to prepare for so you can be intentional about your choices during those times?