Balance. One of my goals is to live a balanced life, what about you? What do you visualize when you think of balance? Is it Lady Justice with a scale balancing the evidence to determine a just verdict in a trial? Do you visualize a young gymnast walking a balance beam or a bicyclist performing a difficult feat?
Balance requires paying attention to your purpose and keeping everything in its proper place to accomplish your goal. Failure to keep your balance can be hurtful to you and others.
Speaking of hurtful or dangerous. Do you recall this amazing high-wire feat at the Twin Towers in NYC in 1974? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwbil5puqng
I’m not fond of heights, standing on a high ladder to clean gutters or painting. And I certainly don’t subscribe to what you just saw. What I’m talking about is balance in how we live.
How do we find a healthy balance in our out-of-balance culture? We live with daily tension between our culture’s lure to self-centeredness and our calling to be “salt and light” in a world desperately looking for love in all the wrong places. Paul encourages us to balance our life by applying the teachings of Christ in our culture rather than being shaped by its values.
In his letter to the Philippians, he tells us to live out our salvation experience in our current environment of unbelief and opposition: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling…in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:12, 15).
I believe a large part of our struggle with balance is our confusion between the goal of life and the counterfeit offers of our culture. Maybe we are so busy with the “means” that we haven’t thought deeply about the “end” or purpose of our existence. A few seem to get it, but many do not. God has intended that our money, time, health, and all good things he has made available to us are to serve as a means to an end. When we forget where these gifts originate or the purpose for which they exist, we become very narrowly focused and selfish. If we follow the way of our culture, our possessions will inevitably possess us.
You can find help to balance your family life in my books Parenting With a Purpose and Marriage is What You Make It at www.cosdavis.com. (book tab)