All through life you will find that there are responsibilities which you have to juggle and keep in balance. Sometimes this comes with experience, but many times there are people who decide they either need to move forward or…
I love listening to podcasts about people who are pushing forward and challenging both themselves and the people around them. These are people who are not satisfied with sitting still and getting smothered by the (and I’ll describe this nicely!) garbage which is being pushed at us through the media. (here’s a bit of a side thought – How can we grow a self-sustaining good news broadcast – Hmmmmm?)
One of the podcasts which I listen to is Exploring the Marketplace by Shawn Bolz, In one of his recent podcasts Shawn was speaking to Michael Hyatt (find the link for the podcast in the notes below*). Michael Hyatt has scaled multiple companies over the years, including a $250M publishing company with 700+ employees, and his company has been featured in the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing companies in America for 3 years in a row. (* notes – Link to Exploring The Marketplace with Shawn Bolz and Michael Hyatt – www.tinyurl.com/y3hyh6gx).
Parable of Financial Stewardship
There was one section which stood out to me. They started to talk about the Parable of the Talents which we find in Matthew 25:14-30. In some of the versions this is also called the Parable of Financial Stewardship. Here’s a quick summary of the parable – A shrewd business person was going on a long trip, and he decided to give authority to 3 trusted servants. So to one servant he gave £5000, the next one received £3000, and the last received £1000. When the master returned the first servant had doubled the amount of money from £5000 to £10,000, the second servant had doubled their money from £3000 to £6000, but the last servant had just taken the money and had hid it in a hole and did nothing with it.
The master was very annoyed that the servant had wasted his money and time, and took the money away from the last servant and gave it to the servant who had the most.
Now let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective instead of it just being all about money. Instead of talking about money the first servant was given 5 areas of responsibility – let’s say their marriage, another was teaching the teenage kids about respect to their elders in the local community, the third was running a small business, the fourth looking after elderly parents, and the fifth was helping to run a youth club. All of these are normal everyday responsibilities which parents seek to balance through different stages of life. The second servant was slightly younger and he had responsibility for a newborn child, his marriage and a 9 to 5 job with a bit of responsibility. The third servant was younger again, and had maybe just got married and this was the one thing which he needed to concentrate on to build a foundation for the future.
In the parable no one else made any judgement call about how the master dealt with people, the first two servants didn’t have any complaints about how the master treated them. But when the third servant is asked he immediately described the master as a “shrewd and ruthless businessman who grows rich on the backs of others”. Everybody else respected the master, but the last servant felt he had to justify his actions and claim that he was being picked on.
So why had the third servant not taken any responsibility for his new marriage, he didn’t bother working on it, he didn’t try to make any changes, he just pushed it away and pushed it into the background. He was too busy doing nothing to see if he could make it grow.
All through life you will find that there are responsibilities which you have to juggle and keep in balance. Sometimes this comes with experience, but many times there are people who decide they either need to move forward or increase the size of their house because they are planning for a new child. They see a goal in the future, and they decide they need to take on new responsibility to get to that future goal. However, there are those who are self-centred and can’t be bothered, so they push the responsibilities into the background, never stepping up to help others even if they are family or a partner. Which do you want to be? Someone who always complains and is always the victim, or someone who loves the people around him or her and will step up and enjoy the challenge?
