The Best of Intentions

Sometimes the best of intentions, the most valid of goals – clash. I find this terribly frustrating. It’s hard enough for me to come to any sort of clarity about what I call the “big questions” in life: what is important, how should I live - should I turn this way or that way at the crossroads?

Then, no sooner do I get some of these vexing questions settled (insofar as such questions can ever be settled…) then I find my all noble goals and aspirations crashing into one another!

I had a funny taste of this last Sunday after church. I had just finished delivering a sermon about things, stuff – and our relationship to them. I talked about how easy it is for us to become enslaved by our own “stuff” and by the societal pressure to accumulate and consume ever more ravenously. At the very end of the service, I challenged all of us to go home and take on that dusty and unopened box of junk we all put off dealing with – and to start liberating ourselves from all the “stuff” that clutters our lives and distracts us from the things that matter most.

So far so good.

But then, after the service, a couple of women came up to say hello. They told me how much they enjoyed the service, and then, with a devilish gleam in their eyes, they reminded me that just a couple weeks ago I preached a sermon encouraging people to make their Sundays into Sabbath days – days without work! These two had been assiduously working to build and honor their Sabbath day – and here was their minister telling them to go home and clean out their junk drawers!

Ahhh, there’s the rub.

And so, once again, two important and meaningful priorities collide. I am so grateful for the feedback those two women. They reminded me that the real challenge of living our values is not when we have to choose between the “right way” and the “wrong way” – but when two “right ways” have trouble fitting into the same space at the same time.

I did correct myself in the second service, making sure to encourage people to declare war on their junk on Monday or Tuesday instead of Sabbath Sunday – but still, the issue remains an important one. How can we balance all the values we hold dear, especially when they sometimes seem to be competing for the scant energy we have left over at the end of yet another long day?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a great answer to this question. I struggle with these kinds of tough choices all the time. What I can suggest is that we can be gentle and patient with ourselves. We don’t have to get everything done immediately or perfectly, or maybe even at all. We can take things in their own time, step by step. To paraphrase the Book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time to reap, a time to sow – a time for every purpose under heaven. A time for all things.

But only as individuals can we figure out if this is a time for reaping or sowing - what we need to be working on right now. So reflect deeply, prioritize based on what you need most right now – and don’t beat yourself up when you fall down. The mere fact that so many of us even care about difficult questions like, “how shall I live?” is amazing, and he fact that so many of us try so hard to walk our talk is wonderfully inspiring.

When we find ourselves forced to choose between two goods, then we have to know that something is going very RIGHT in our lives. Those are the kinds of problems I want to have!