Conflicting Demands...

Thursday, March 31, 2011. Our life often has conflicting demands or conflicting goals. We are in the middle of them and it is left to us to make sense of it, to balance the demands, to respond and find a path through the different scources pulling in different directions.

Conflicting Demands …

The experience with conflicting demands can be a part of my job. Perhaps, I am working for a company. One task is to sell as much as possible. Another task is to have innovative products all the time. A third task is to have lean and efficient management. But then there is the administration pulling, since they want many documents. There are various other sections, who want service. And there is a management which wants to deliver good numbers, so they are trying to reduce the staff numbers. In the middle of this you are a little manager with limited freedom to do decisions.

You do not need to be a manager to experience conflicting demands. If you have a family with kids and work at the same time, then conflicting demands appear every day. Kids need help. They want money to attend various leisure activities. Family life wants you to be there with a lot of time. And at the same time your company is pulling to get the most out of you. Days start early and they end late.

How do we deal with conflicting demands? How do we balance the different sides? Either one is very happy and the others are very unhappy, or all of them are half unhappy. Can we live with this situation? How do we live with it, what is our view, what are our emotions, how do we control the matter?

God's Role …

We also ask God for his advice and want to learn what his role can be. Is he just another source of demands: on top of all the other things? Is that God's role? A purely ethic understanding of Christianity would put him in as a key demand, the one who determines our basic principles. But that is an extremely limited and dangerous viewpoint!

God wants to be our saviour. I understand that with respect to guilt and lostness. But I also interpret his saving powers with respect to the conflicts of our life. Conflicting demands are a particular layer of conflict, and he can and wants to be our saviour in this layer as well. He will not save us from the conflict, but he will save us in and through the conflict.

God knows the conflict very well. Jesus had these conflicts himself, though he did not have a family. But he lived with friends and disciples, who had their own demands and ideas. But he had a clear task given by the eternal father. He gave us clear priorities, from which all the conflicting demands can be treated and sorted. The priority is the kingdom of heaven, the life with the Lord, being a child of the eternal God and saviour. ... more texts