Are You Balanced in the 4 Areas of Life?

 

I *love* Sunday School teachers.

I don’t teach Sunday School.

It would make perfect sense that I would. I have a degree in elementary education. I love kids and have plenty of experience with kids.

Teaching Sunday School is not my calling, at least not at this season of life. Quite frankly, after years of being a foster parent plus caring for my current children, I’m kid-ed out. I need time with adults.

I am also not a room mom, I don’t sing in the church choir, and I’m not on the PTCO. These are all worthy and wonderful endeavors. They are just not my calling. Doing any of them would throw me out of balance, a place I have been before and to which I do not care to return. Ever.

Most of us struggle to find life balance.

Each of us faces challenges making the bits and parts, the big chunks of time and the tiny pieces of our lives fit into a blended picture of the greater whole we are striving to create.

How can we make it work?

The first key element is in definition. We must set aside the belief that balance is learning to give equal time to parts of an equation. God has created us to be so much more complex and fantastic than that.

Contained within us is not an old-fashioned scale that needs to be given an equal weight for “time with the kids” and “time at work” in order for our guilt metric to register at a sleep-inducing zero.

Let’s use this definition instead:

Living a balanced life is answering God’s call to be who I am created to be in my church, family, work, and community.

I have freedom to live as who I am created to be — not who my neighbor is, not who I think I should be. Instead, who God created me to be, and who He is calling me to be.

Every person — EVERY person — from young children to people retired from the workforce and all of us in between, has callings in the 4 areas. What are yours?

Who am I created to be in my church?

Who am I created to be in my family?

Who am I created to be in my work?

Who am I created to be in my community?

Andy Crouch, executive editor of Christianity Today explains this concept best,

For career, family, and calling are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries, and in the end they are minor mysteries. They pale beside the real mystery, which is how our lives are held in a greater life, how our death shall be overcome by a greater death, and how even the smallest things in our days – the lunch boxes, lab reports, and logistics – can become doorways to the life that is really life.

Someday God might call me to teach Sunday School.

Then again He might not. For now, I will give my kids’ Sunday School teachers really cool Christmas gifts, thank them often, and celebrate how they are using their gifts to God’s glory.

I will answer God’s call in my life by saying yes to what I’m supposed to be doing with laser focus, and saying no to everything else without guilt, so that I can say,

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Colossians 3:17

What has God called you to in this season?