Brad, I thought you brought up some good points. A couple of my mine...
The idea of work suffering or family suffering makes sense to me. It sounds good to say that neither has to suffer, but if you live in a realistic world where you have limited time (there are only 24 hours in a day), at some point you have to make priority choices. I think I understand where you are coming from, Brad, but I think you are associating the word suffer with negative implications, in the sense of either work being "bad" or family being "bad". But I think that Donald Miller meant suffering more in the context of potential. There is always more that I could do at work. And there is also always more that I can do for family relationships. In other words, we all have limited resources to spend (time, energy, emotion) and I have to choose where to spend them. I don't think your analogy of switching from AEGON really fits here, because you didn't do it knowing that it was LESS of a career opportunity, but exactly the opposite; it provided more potential. I'm not sure if I'm verbalizing this well or not. From a personal example, I "volunteered" to go to Iraq. To be honest, there is a good possibly that I could have weasled my way out of that deployment. There were other people on the "short list" that may have been chosen to go, but I volunteered to take the bullet before the leadership had to make a "command" decision. I weighed the pros and cons of going, and the pros were all purely career related, with the exception of increased income for half a year. I will never know if I made the right choice, especially if I'm never promoted again. Being separated from my wife was extremely difficult, so I feel like I made a choice in which my family suffered. If I somehow managed to avoid deploying, there is no doubt that my career would suffer (although my chances of promotion are slim based on limited openings, I would probably not even be considered had I not deployed to Middle East). All that to say that I think most people know that they could make conscious choices to be with family more knowing that their career prospects would suffer because of it. The Navy has taken great strides in the past 20 years to try to make families feel like they are as much a part of the Navy as the active duty member. That's because they know that often if a Sailor has to choose between the Navy and family, he's going to choose family, and they are going to lose a trained Sailor. Check out this article about GenX dads choosing family over work.
Donald Miller says to plow he field that God gives you and to stop measuring your crops. From a business perspective, I agree with your comments Brad. But I think Miller is addressing a spiritual issue here that is pretty hotly debated. I'm certainly no expert, but having had some Bible college and seminary I've heard it discussed at length several times. It's the issue of God's blessings, and what God expects of each person. One camp will say that God has gifted every single person in a special way, and because of that every person should be doing something spectacular, they should be a superstar at something. It very quickly turns into a health and welfare gospel, where God wants you to be wealthy. Okay, I AM bringing this around, believe it or not. In the spiritual realm, you have to be very careful with measurement. If you use a business-like measurement in dealing with spirituality, you end up looking at things that are quantifiable, like new people joining the church, people coming forward during the invitation, youth attending the youth group, etc. And God doesn't always work by numbers. Does a pastor who labors in the same church in the same small town for 35 years with a congregation that never tops 105 not have the blessing of God? Should he move on? If he has the opportunity to move to a "megachurch" in a larger town with a congregation of 7500 does that mean that he should? So I think that is the point Miller is trying to making about measuring your crops. Measuring usually equates to a "worldy" (if you will) standard, and God doesn't work by "worldly" standards, so quit measuring. I just finished a book called Messy Spirituality in which the pastor somewhat jokingly talks about how his church "grew" from 100 to 30 people. That's because he was plowing the field that God gave him and doing it in the manner God was leading him to. Had he used a typical measurement, he may have abandoned what he was doing, leaving the field that God had given him.
Maybe this is semantics, I don't know. I have a suspicion that your response, Brad, will be that you still need to measure, but you just need to identify what the crop is and how you're going to measure it. From a purely spiritual perspective, it does get messy. God's blessing looks different to different people. Some people who feel themselves the most blessed look to the average person to be suffering greatly.
Eh, I'm close to jettisoning this whole post because I don't feel that I'm making my point very well. I just have random thoughts rolling around. Not every field is a big one. Being a good steward of a small field doesn't automatically mean you'll get a bigger field. I think the idea of always looking for bigger and better fields causes a lot of discontent. I think Miller is saying to be content with what you've been given. Things take time. Be diligent with what you have, keep plowing, and you won't starve.
I'm rambling. Enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment