How many of you feel like the demands of ministry are ever increasing?
How many of us want a better work-life balance?
We start out thinking that we will be different. We will be the ones who maintain a healthy work-life balance, while accomplishing all the work of ministry. But then the creep comes in. First it is checking email at home. Then it becomes doing extra work in the evening, whether we are single or married, with kids or without kids.
Before long we realize that life is completely of whack. I have not had time for my hobby in months. I have not gotten around to the house project I have been wanting to tackle for over a year now.
If only I had more time. If only I had more control over my schedule.
I have recently read a book on hurry (The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer) and productivity (Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt, watch for a GroupTalk on this book soon). While the two might sound at odds with each other, read in tandem I have found them to offer some great insights into this problem of hurry, busyness, distraction that seems to plague all of our lives.
At the heart of Comer’s book is the idea that hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life (which comes from the late Dallas Willard). Hurry crowds out space to be free to listen to Jesus. Hurry keeps us busy with a myriad of tasks without every really accomplishing anything of substance. As Comer writes, “What you give your attention to is the person you become.”
At the heart of Hyatt’s book is the idea that when it comes to our jobs, the goal is not about doing more things, but about doing the right things.
But in order to accomplish and focus on the right things (namely those tasks, those meetings that will move our ministry forward the most), we need to do some preliminary work. We must…no…we absolutely must determine and focus on what matter most.
Comer writes, “We achiever inner peace when our schedules are aligned with our values…. If our values are life with Jesus and a growing in maturity toward love, joy, and peace, then our schedules and the set of practices that make up our days and weeks, which together essentially constitute our rules of life, are the ways we achieve inner peace.”
Or as Hyatt writes, “We should design our lives first and then tailor our work to meet our lifestyle objectives.”
Sadly many of us, myself included, simply try to figure out how to get our work under control without situating work in the larger, more grandiose vision of the sort of person you and I long to become.
As you think about where you are and your current situation, before you make changes at work, please, please, please, take the time to have the harder conversation of who you want to become and how everything else fits into that vision. Include your spouse, if you are married. Include friends. Include your kids, if you have them and they are old enough to contribute.
Who do you, who do I, want to become? And what changes must I make in order to accomplish this?
