I have been working on my sermon for this coming Sunday all week. We are doing this series called Happily Ever After and this week is Chapter 4: The Career. The sermon is all about balancing our jobs and our time at home.And I have to say, its been very convicting as I prepare to speak this week. I am a workaholic by nature. I come from a family of self-employer business owners and hard workers. Its in my blood. Work is what I love to do. It drives my life sometimes even.BUT WHEW! God has really been making me feel like I am a big jerk sometimes. I have been doing a really great job lately about balancing things. Amber would even affirm that right now!I have had all of this in the back of my head since the start of 2007 (new years resolution stuff) but now I am going to attempt to really verbalize it and work it out in my life.So here is what I am doing. Before Couper is born, I am setting some rules in my life that will help me balance work and home. But I am in a special predicament because my job is quite different than most.

How do you balance family and ministry? How do you develop healthy boundaries? Few occupations take a toll like ministry. Ministry has unique benefits. But ministry also has unique emotional, relational, and spiritual challenges. -Mark Batterson

BUT, family is more important than ministry. At the same time, the more personal sacrifices leaders make the more of a difference we’ll make in people’s lives. Those of us who are occupationally-driven, like me, face a danger: work becomes home and home becomes work.That is why we have to have some self-imposed limits. Lucky for me, I don’t mind saying no. So I am already one step ahead.I just need to figure out what will help me BE OFF on my days off. So, I am going to try an experiment. No e-mail on fridays and no work-related phone calls on fridays. I simply won’t check the e-mail and I won’t answer the calls.We’ll see how this works out for me…