Stewarding Your Life

I've been there.  I finally figured it out, overcome a hurdle, broken through a roadblock, or achieved a goal. It feels so good.  I've "arrived"!

I like this feeling.  I feel empowered, free, on top of the world.  I want to stay here forever. I've found my zone.  But now I have a new responsibility - I need to steward this new experience for God's glory.  I need to ask Him how He wants me to use my new-found freedom.  I doubt that God released this in me so that I could just benefit myself.

Tunnel vision isn't good in the long run.  Granted, in order to achieve my above accomplishment I utilized a healthy dose of tunnel vision - or intense focus. But then I need to broaden my focus again and figure out where I am now in the grand scheme of things and how this new "thing" fits into the bigger picture.

Have you ever seen or heard about the wheel of life? Picture a pie and each slice represents areas of your life that you can impact.  Different people use different categories but for sake of this article, I'll use these:  Spiritual, Relational, Financial, Physical, Career, and Personal.  So, the idea is to have balance in each of these categories in order to have a well-rounded life represented by each slice being the same size.

I like to think of it as stewarding each of these categories.  What does God want me to do, feel, act, or experience in these categories? How will I know this?  I need to ask Him.  Reality is that you can't be perfectly balanced.  However, if we don't re-visit this wheel occasionally, we can find ourselves definitely "out of balance" with one or two slices getting bigger while others are shrinking. 

Let's get personal - I recently learned a new eating style that resonates with me, and I've found success at losing weight and feeling great.  At first I spent a lot of time reading books, learning new recipes, and creating a new mindset toward food and eating habits.  I found that much of my day was absorbed with Facebook groups, recipe blogs, shopping trips, and dirty dishes.  I did not spend much time in my spiritual, career, or financial category (in fact I broke the budget a time or two).  It wasn't that my new knowledge was wrong, but I started taking it to such an extreme that it did impact the other categories of my life. Eventually I "looked up" and realized how intensely focused I was and decided that I needed to regroup. My goal is to have a well-rounded life, and it became much easier to balance this new eating lifestyle into the pie after I felt a level of accomplishment in it.

So, what my example is trying to explain is that at times, you do need to put extra effort and focus on one category at the expense of others in order to make progress, however, you can't stay there.  The other categories miss you - especially if there are people in those categories who have felt left out.

How do you know if you are out of balance?  Ask God - especially if your desire is to love God by obediently stewarding all your categories for Him.  He just might tell you to ask the people who love you what they think.  I bet they have some insight they'd love to share with you…