By Danae Templeton
The demands of life scream for our attention, demanding that we take care of them all at once. There are dishes, laundry, church, job, family, husband, kids, friends, studies, volunteering, crises, finances, health, and/or relationships to tend to. You might be juggling some combination of these, or all of the above, or even more. The pressure is on to achieve more, manage more, and just have more in our lives, even if we already can’t handle what’s on our plate.
So, how do you manage it all? How do you go about finding balance in life? You always imagine that things will slow down after this week, or this month, or this year, but it never does. There is always something going on. How do we find time for it all, not to mention pursuing God and taking care of ourselves?
You have probably seen the illustration with a large jar, golf balls, marbles, and sand. The idea is that when we put the most important things in life (represented by the golf balls) first, then second priority (marbles) next, then the least important (sand) last, then things have a way of fitting a lot better into our given time (jar). As C.S. Lewis said, “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.”
This illustration is helpful to a certain extent, but how do we determine what are the most important aspects of our lives at any given time? Is it fixed, always direct, like “God, family, church” or “God, job, family,” or the other way around?
Perhaps the idea is not a strict hierarchy. Our identities are first in Christ, and everything flows from that. If that is the case, then our only goal is to follow the will of God from day to day. He may want us to have a different priority for a season, and we have to know Him better in order to determine His plan.
Listen to the Spirit and enjoy these articles compiled for you by Just Between Us (JBU), as different women tackle the subject of finding balance in their own lives and the lives of those they love.