Balancing Responsibilities of Life

One of the biggest truths we have to face in life is the fact of our responsibilities. Now, responsibility is a balance between taking too much responsibility and not accepting enough. God’s will is that we are able to discern the exact portion of responsibility due us in our personal and interpersonal lives.

When we know what we are responsible for—to what extent within the relationships and tasks of life we are responsible for—and we are able to act appropriately in discharging those responsibilities—we have the very input to wisdom. Then we are blessed with the sort of peace of mind most only dream about.

Most of our problems emanate from the fact that we take too much responsibility or we don’t accept enough. The one is driven by too much ownership and compassion—usually out of anxiety; the other is driven by a lack of diligence or tiredness. But when we are in the habit of constantly going to God, in seeking divine knowledge of what we are truly responsible for, God blesses us with wisdom for the discharge of loving action into our lives.

At the very pinnacle of performance for getting responsibility right is being accountable to God, alone.

Being Accountable to God

This is the greatest wisdom: to warrant to God the surrender of one’s life, such that God has total control, and the comprehensiveness of say, in our moment-by-moment going out, staying out, and coming home in life.

We find that when we have given God everything, our Lord gives us back more than everything in return. This ‘everything’ we get, having been blessed, is more than the ‘everything’ we could ever have imagined. We can’t explain how this happens; it just happens.

Having given all our motivation and will over to God, being accountable to the Holy One alone, means we are more perfectly accountable in all of life; a key indicator of which is the solemn serenity we experience in our relationships.

Conflict is fleeting and quickly resolved to the satisfaction of both parties. We are given more of the knowledge of God’s invisible will as we detect dynamics within our relationships so as to ask more of the right questions about how ‘we’ are going.

Only when we know the balance of our responsibilities—and we’re getting that balance right more often than we aren’t—can we begin to give more, out of the love we have left over. Giving then becomes no chore at all.

When we have the balance of our responsibilities right, other people know where they stand with us. With boundaries firmer, within the loving flexibility of grace, people feel more comfortable with us. Trust and intimacy become easier.

***

Balancing responsibilities is the hardest task of life. But when we surrender to God—being accountable to our Lord’s will alone—our priorities are re-sorted. Then we know what to care about from what not to care about. We cannot care about everything. Wisdom is in separating the two and applying what we’ve learned.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.