Micro Stewardship vs. Control (or Lack Thereof)

How do I get to a state where life isn’t driving me crazy?

I’m not sure why, but I suspect that my wild swings between spontaneous artist and rational engineer may stem from the fact that I am an only child who grew up with technical parents and grandparents, who also happen to be very creative and entrepreneurial. So I’ve lived both ends of this spectrum described here:

Option A: life will drive you crazy if you want to exert maximized total control over every possible decision to be had. Option B: life will fail to be well-lived if we let things letting things take their natural course, or succumb to the second law of thermodynamics (the disorder of a system increases over time). So although we see amazing order in the universe, disorder is the direction in which it is moving (see! The universe does the wild swing thing too!)

The prevailing culture of the conveyor whispers two lies: 1) Don’t worry about a thing because it will all work out as long as you stay on the conveyor, 2) Worry about every iota because there’s no way it’s going to work out and the only way it will is if I do something about it! I’m proposing that there is a sweet spot somewhere called Stewardship that doesn’t demand either extreme of maximum control or laziness.

It’s not about me.

A steward is someone who takes care of things that don’t really belong to him. Living as a steward begins with acknowledging that as humans, we do have the power to influence outcomes, but we don’t have the power to exert exact outcomes.

How to Go Crazy with Control

I once had a friend in college who tried for 2 weeks to do everything as un-repeatably and to as many degrees of variation as possible. He would change the order in which he bathed his various body parts. Switch how he brushed his teeth, and used his non-dominant hand for everything. He would take ways to places he didn’t usually take when he walked or drove. And well, he didn’t make it through the 2 weeks. Those auto-pilot mechanisms of habit which had developed over time allowed his mind to be used for other things, like studying for a Chemistry exam or thinking nice things about his girlfriend. Throwing out routine leaves us with too much to control.

Or maybe the control-exertion extends into a more obvious regime of life: over food, over our children, our careers. Either way, trying to control things we simply can’t control, well, there are plenty of clinical studies and enough self-help books on stress out there that makes its deleterious effects (which are pretty obvious) clinically obvious. Even for those masters of self-control (!) who still love to control, this typically means lower quality of life, more regrets, and all of those things you don’t want to be thinking of on your deathbed.

Curious Mother Nature

On the flip side, you’ve seen a vacant home or once-beautiful garden where “nature took its course.” You’ve met a rudderless, ballast-less person or drifted in about out of drifty relationships with people, groups, organizations. Isn’t it fascinating that with all of the order we see in creation and community around us, letting things take their course never results in additional order? How curious. It seems that being adrift in complete abdication rarely works on a personal level either.

So now what? The hard part is that stewardship isn’t formulaic. You can’t get the answers in a book or a rubric. So let’s start thinking about stewardship by considering some real life examples.

Stewardship Exhibit A: Our Family Size

We don’t get a ton of comments any more about our family size. Maybe it’s because we don’t get out much. Or because the children really are generally  awesome and don’t typically resemble a dumpster fire when we’re all together. At any rate, just to be clear, yes, these children are all mine. They all came out of my body. Yes, I do know what causes this.

Which brings me to exhibit A, stewarding fertility. Every family knows the ups and downs, the pros and cons, and hopefully finds early on in a marriage a unifying and agreeable way to steward family size. I know it’s not always tidy or agreeable, but that is for another post!

We went for control early on in our marriage. That didn’t work very well because of the tendency of chemical contraceptives to work against natural law (more on that in our next post on Stewardship). And for us, we like to listen carefully: to what our bodies are telling us, what our children and friendships and organizations are whispering all the time. Natural law, or working within the design of our bodies, is so much better all around for our bodies, for our marriage, for our family.

Over time we settled in comfortably as Natural Family Planning (NFP) people. What we like best about how we use NFP is that we don’t try to control all of the factors of fertility. Rather, we steward what we have with what we know at the time, acknowledging that we don’t have a crystal ball to see into the future, but we do trust in a good God who helps us to make real life decisions, like welcoming another human into our family.

Stewardship Exhibit B: Bob’s Meds

Meet Bob. About 20 years ago, I worked with a fascinating man named Bob. He was a fabulous guy, good thinker. But he always told me (at regular intervals throughout the day) what pills he was taking and for what ailments. He didn’t really complain about the ailments, he just liked telling me about them. And as his cubicle-mate, I didn’t really mind. We were all like one big natural-light-deprived family of nerds. Well, it turns out that his ailments were all stacked because of the pills he was taking for various symptoms. Bob had Type II diabetes.

But Bob really liked the sugary foods and the sedentary lifestyle that got him there, so he took meds to deal with the symptoms. Those meds caused side effects, for which he took more meds, and so on, and so on. So instead of working with the laws of nature (eat more veggies, use your body, and stop drinking the diet Coke, Bob!) he decided it was easier for him to short circuit the natural rightsiding mechanisms of his body through the use of various drugs.

Was Bob a good steward? Maybe. Maybe not. Did he consider all of the factors and deliberately choose his meds and accept the consequences of that thinking? I believe he did, in accordance with his values for life. Isn’t it interesting how there is not a formulaic way to answer the difficult and practical questions of life? Good philosophy accounts for the diversity and beauty of our differences.

What Next?

You can find an additional example of our stewardship of screens and electronics at this post.

Or check out this podcast about The Invisible Girl whose parents took her so far off the conveyor that what was intended for a blessing became a curse. In this case, a stewardship decision directly reached into the life of another person. Next time I’ll share more considerations about the macro version of stewardship and how organizations from families to nations are affected.

Tell me what you think! Love me, hate me, but either way leave a comment.