My Key to Joyful Re-entry: The Right Preposition

So on Friday I talked about my goals coming into sabbatical...and how good the Lord has been to help me get traction towards those goals. Goal #4 ran the deepest, here's what it was:

To seek the Lord about what it means to do campus work healthily--some in terms of expectations and margins, but especially as it relates to keeping my identity separate and distinct from the ups and downs of ministry.

The idea here is to develop healthy emotional distance between me and my work. There's my own identity in Christ. Then there's the work God's called me to do. They are related, but not identical...something that I often forget.

I've been particularly aided in this task over the past week as I've been reading the book "Boundaries." And the idea that I've been meditating on is replacing the wrong preposition with the right preposition; replacing for with to.

In "Boundaries" they contend that at the core, emotionally healthy people have a clear sense of what we can and can't control. What we can control is ourselves, our responses, our actions, our decisions. What we can't control is what other people do, how they respond or react.

They argue that to emotionally healthy people understand that they are responsible to other people but not for other people.

So as a parent, I'm responsible to my children to parent with love, discipline, encouragement, teaching, correcting, play, etc. but I am not ultimately responsible for how they turn out. As they grow older, they are responsible for making their own decisions. I'm responsible to them but not for them. They are their own people.

The same principle applies in marriage, work relationships, family dynamics, etc. We are responsible to one another but we are not responsible for one another. We have to realize where we end and where other people begin. That's healthy emotional boundaries.

It's also really hard for control-freak over-achievers like myself.

And so as I return to work tomorrow morning with the rest of America, I'm praying for holy and healthy prepositions to help me: I'm responsible to the community of InterVarsity students that I serve, but I'm not responsible for them. Some students will stay and flourish. Some will stay on the periphery. Some will be regularly frustrated or critical of things we do. Some will leave. As a whole we will inevitably have seasons of growth and seasons of struggle.

I have a responsibility to serve and lead as faithfully as I can. But ultimately, I cannot make the community or individuals in the community do or be anything. I must do what I can to be a healthy, whole, mature human being, speaking truth as faithfully as I can, in step with the Spirit.

The rest is up to the people that I serve to respond to the Spirit as He does His work. Doing this would go a long way towards making me a healthy campus minister...not to mention a better husband, dad, and son.

The key to this whole thing is the right preposition....I knew there was some reason why I was an English major.