Aj Schwanz

Comments from my previous post “The NextGen of Women in Leadership”

One of the keys is that men will also have to be free to teach a class and then come home and snuggle with the baby while the mother is out leading her class. Fathers will have sit out a few things because their children canít handle it. ~Robin M.

For those who are called and gifted by God, we must remove the cultural barriers to their eager response. Neither male or female leaders in the church should ignore family responsibilities either. Balance is a key to a fulfilled life. ~Keith

I’ve been thinking about balance a lot as of late: balancing my roles as wife/mother/writer/leader/child of God; balancing my time between working/playing/planning/resting (the later is definitely notsobalanced); balancing time in community/online/in silence. It seems that God works in realms of balance. My son has had some problems with his skin, and I keep wondering what they did in the “days of yore” when they couldn’t go to Freddies and pick up a tube of magic ointment. Engaging in my Mama Reference Librarian skills, I’ve found a lot of recommended natural remedies online: it seems that when there’s yuck, like skin problems, there’s a balancing goodness provided in nature . . . sometimes.

That balance, or flow, seems to be necessary in our lives, our ministries, our relationships, our inner selves. This is why the comments by Robin and Keith strike such a deep chord with me.

Miroslav Volf writes in Exclusion and Embrace:

To find peace, people with self-enclosed identities need to open themselves for one another and give themselves to one another, yet without loss of the self or domination of the other.

What does that look like in ministry?

” . . . the affirmation of the equal dignity of genders, the symmetry in construction of gender identities, and the presence of the other in the self — all of this is kept in motion by self-giving love. Though the goal of self-giving is the mutuality of perfect love, the road toward this goal in a world of enmity often leads through the narrow paths of one-sided giving of the self for the other. The model for the goal is the eternal embrace of divine persons; the model for the difficult road toward the goal is Christ’s embrace of sinful humanity on the cross” (190).

I’m not going to pretend I have a steady grasp on this. But look at these words:

• symmetry
• motion
• self-giving love
• mutuality
• perfect love
• eternal embrace
• Christ’s embrace

That’s stuff I want to be a part of. Shouldn’t this be descriptive of my daily life? How would my life have to flow to look like this? . . .