Balance: Further Reflections

One of the most significant insights that have echoed in my soul in 2010 has been to consider what God would like the balance of my life to be.  The more I have tried to live in pursuit of the righteous life, the more abundantly obvious it has become how it is nearly impossible for me to discern the best way to spend my moments.  In any given day, there are so many things competing for my heart and mind that I find myself having to say "No" to more and more things.  Ann has reminded me continually that the ability to say "No" is one I've desperately needed.  Now that I do, knowing precisely when to use it is no less problematic.

Every component of our lives cries for attention.  Career, ministry, spouse, rest, time with God, children, spiritual disciplines, household tasks, community involvement, sleep, personal fitness, maintaining contact in significant relationships.  The list seems endless to me.  And the truth is, I genuinely enjoy most of these things.  For the most part, I run to them, not from them.  But there is a limit to what can be packed into a day.  For a while the attempt to work more efficiently relieves the burden of an overbusy life.  But there comes a point when you simply cannot do everything.  Lists have blank spaces where I feel there ought to be checkmarks.

What makes these dilemmas so perplexing is finding the balance between priority and desire, wants and needs, urgency and importance, immediate impact and long term significance.  I almost feel like I'm sitting in Mr. Keating's class as he recites Mr. J. Evans Pritchard's guidelines for understanding poetry.  I can graph out all the relative factors and chart what I ought to be doing.  But what room do we leave for the Spirit to instruct our souls when this is how we determine how to live our lives?  Is this really how God wants me deciding what to do when I have a free half an hour?

A more obvious consequence of the process I use is the model I set for those who view how I live.  My eldest daughter is an extraordinary young woman with great talents.  But she also possesses a remarkable propensity toward overcommitment, fatigue, and burnout.  Hmm, wonder where she learned that?  And yet when I consider how I've lived my life it is very difficult to determine what I should NOT have done.  What ought I to have left out in order that I was not pushing my capacity to the very limits?  Should we not live close to the edge of what we are capable of accomplishing while we are here?  Is this not what it means to "make the most of every opportunity"? (Eph 5:15-16).

This blog is such a perfect illustration of my struggle.  I began this year with the very real hope to blog every day in 2010.  Clearly, this has been a disastrous commitment in terms of follow-through.  Yet this very failure highlights the very thing God is teaching me.  As I write, there are more things to do today than I will likely get done.  I need to take my kids a couple places I've promised, do some errands Ann's asked me to do while she's at work, go to the hospital, and I have friends who intend to come over tonight.  Somewhere between taking my son to "Free Comic Book Day," the kids to the library and the Strawberry Festival, and a visit to "Tudor's Biscuit World" -- I'm not going to be able to do it all and everything else as well.  But perhaps the essence of the life of faith is to head off in a godly direction and see how He redirects our paths.  Proverbs 3:5-6.