By Michael Sullivant
One of the skills we are meant to learn during the parent stage of maturity is to gracefully balance and synchronize our attention and energies to meet the appropriate needs of our spouse, children, extended family, church, work, friends, and the broader community. I’m now almost 70 with five married adult children and 15 grandchildren. My balance of responsibilities has shifted in various ways. During my parent stage of life, I was a vocational pastor and keenly aware of all of these needs I was committed to and expected to fulfill as a husband, father, son, brother, leader, teacher, friend, and citizen. Wow … that is a lot of plates to keep spinning simultaneously and it’s enough to make one sigh deeply!
I embraced a concept in the face of these many commitments that helped me responsibly fulfill “my end” of these various “bargains”. I rejected the idea I was initially taught that we should think of our priorities in life according to a model of descending hierarchical responsibilities: God first, spouse second, children third, work fourth, and down the chain. Rather, I considered that God belonged in the center of a circle with each of these relational priorities identified as “slices of the pie”.
I also seasonally checked in with Jesus to reaffirm that the roles and tasks set before me were ones he had presently assigned me. With all the possible roles and tasks that parents might take on, they need to be satisfied with and honor the capacity God has given them. This kind of gut check serves to clarify and help us live out from our true identity. Parents must filter out expectations others and groups might try to impose upon them that can pressure them to take on more commitments than God is actually assigning them. Their children will naturally follow this good example and benefit greatly from it.
So, I considered some “slices of the pie” would naturally be larger than others as I discerned how to respond with God and take action week by week. I also progressively learned not to pit one priority against another, but to trust that Jesus would guide me and lead me each day to attend to the priorities I sensed he was highlighting and showing me to pay attention to. This approach reflects what we in the growing Life Model community often call an “Immanuel lifestyle”.
As a result, I wasn’t going about fulfilling my many God-given responsibilities in a pre-programmed, stilted, and/or legalistic way. Fulfilling my promises to people in my life became more like engaging in a graceful (grace-filled!) relational dance with my Lord that would lead us together about the big dance floor. Given some time, we could touch every sector of that floor space and cover the entire territory assigned to me. I also created space in my daily/weekly life to address unexpected situations that would, at times, inevitably interrupt my projected plans. According to the wisdom of Solomon, “there is a time for everything”!
This different view gave me some breathing room to temporarily neglect an important arena of life to meet pressing needs in another important arena. After those needs were met, I would then seek to focus on one of the previously neglected priorities. It’s important to say at this point that I did not expect to accomplish so many things perfectly. Perfectionism drives us to neurosis! If I failed to love someone well, and at times I did, I learned to sincerely say, “I was wrong. I am sorry. I hope you will be able to forgive me.” I joyfully discovered that my people had a lot of grace stored up in their hearts to pardon me!
As a result, my life was not balanced over the length of a day or even a week. It would normally take two weeks to a month for the healthy balance of my life to show. I ended up calling this approach to fulfilling our priorities in all of life flexible diligence.
