Readings

Managing your life over time

In the popular lexicon, “manageable” might get translated into “what I can reasonably handle.” Unmanageable is its opposite. It’s a simple concept: If you’re working past your capabilities, your work will not be done well. If you’re moving faster than the laws of lifestyle physics allow, your speeding is dangerously out of hand. If you’re carrying a work load only elephants could haul, that burden is impossible—and probably a good reason to find a few good elephants to help you.

One more vocabulary lesson: Over time, what’s manageable becomes what’s sustainable. Sustainability—a key word for environmentalists—is the byproduct of manageability. If some element of your life isn’t manageable, it just won’t last. Another way to think about this matter: If you’re not handling things right now, then it’s probably also true that “things just can’t keep going on this way.”

There’s more to simple living than handling well what comes your way. From your understanding of the Spirit’s gifts, living simply is more than just being a good manager, more than being an obedient servant who thinks that “following the household rules” is going to result in the owner’s great and lasting gratitude. However you manage or don’t manage your life isn’t going to save you. That’s God’s work.

What characterizes a manageable life is that not that you just want to get through a day as best you can. Instead, you want to see it as part of a long string of days, made possible by the God who presents each one as a personal gift. When you come to see that your life might stretch out over delightful decades, you want to live simply so that the string won’t be broken before you can pass on the legacy of that gift. Your children, your colleagues, people who read what you write—all of them could be beneficiaries of your stewardship of every facet of life.

What came from the ages will last into the ages. God, who helps in ages past, calls you into ways of living that help don’t destroy the ages yet to come. By your simple living now, you manage what isn’t yours so that God’s gifts will be given to people you will never meet, never know, but can love even now.

Inside of manageability, then, there is love.