Three examples to show why balance may be life’s most elusive goal

 By Mark A. Taylor

You can’t watch a gymnastics competition without feeling your heart race at least a little. The balance beam, in particular, brings hold-your-breath moments, especially when the on-air commentator keeps shouting, “Put your cell phone on the floor and look at it! That’s how wide that beam is!”

As I think back to this year’s Olympics, I’m struck by the amazing skill of the gymnasts walking, leaping, and doing handsprings on the balance beam. But that’s not all. I also realize we just expect these remarkable athletes to complete all these moves. I remember gasping out loud when one, just one, of them almost lost her balance, and sighing sadly when another fell off the beam. Losing their balance was the exception, not the rule.

But I couldn’t do any of those moves on my picnic table, let alone a balance beam. I probably couldn’t even stand on it for more than three seconds. In fact, people my age go to balance trainers, and we’re not talking athletic competition here. Alas, after a certain age we may need help just standing at the sink or getting out of a chair.

One of my favorite sayings—I started repeating it long before I qualified for Medicare—is, “Balance is an elusive goal.” The fact that we need it to successfully navigate the stairs or a sidewalk is only the beginning. Lack of balance causes problems in every area of life. In fact, most magazine articles, many books, and the majority of sermons are trying to pull people back from one extreme or another. And out-of-balance living or thinking drove the prophets to preach and the apostles to write.

Once you start thinking about this, you may see that achieving balance can be an issue in most experiences of life. Here are three to consider.

Grief

Sooner or later all of us grieve. Not only when someone close to us dies, but after any loss—a job, a relationship, a dream, an opportunity. Your once-in-a-lifetime vacation was cancelled due to Covid. Your best friend moves to another country. The promised promotion is given to someone else. The grief that follows such experiences can be deep and raw.

Too often we see Christians pretending such disappointments don’t matter. “I’m fine. I didn’t really want it anyway.”

Or we hear Christians trying to push away grief with platitudes: “Oh, you’ll have another baby!” “Well, God has something better for you in the future.” “Someday you’ll see why he’s just not the right guy for you.”

Instead of sentimental self-protection, we do better to follow the psalmist’s and prophet’s patterns of lament, embrace grief (yours or your friend’s), and then lay it before God.

But don’t wallow in it. Stalled grief leads to a whole range of dysfunction. God may not replace the loss, but he will provide the strength to cope with it. You must keep “walking through the valley.”

The balanced believer leaves cheery denial at one extreme, rejects hopeless despair at the other, and settles on trust.

Failure

More common and probably more often comes the issue of failure. Some folks will hardly admit failure, or they’re full of excuses for why it happened. Hear them claim how it wasn’t their fault.

But others hang their head in hopelessness when they fail, convinced their shortcoming will brand them for life. Watch them give up and slink into the shadows of self-recrimination.

But balanced people learn from their failures. They admit what went wrong and work to figure out how to keep it from happening again. Like Thomas Edison testing thousands and thousands of filaments before he produced a lightbulb, they are neither defensive about nor defeated by failure. Failure is their catalyst for growth.

Lifestyle

Maybe the most difficult balancing act is with lifestyle. Especially in the wealthy West, thoughtful Christians wrestle with how much to keep, how much to donate, how much to spend on pleasure, and how much to deny self to feed and clothe and educate the world’s poverty-laden throngs. Where is the steady middle ground between saving the world and sating myself, giving it all away or keeping it all for myself?

We’ve seen believers living out either extreme on this continuum. Headlines tell of hedonistic celebrity Christian leaders who have amassed more wealth than most will ever see. And we’ve read about vows of poverty and ascetic lifestyles among some followers of Christ who have denied themselves every earthly pleasure.

Is balance possible here? In response to an earlier post I wrote about poverty, one commenter recommended lavish generosity as a solution for this question. I’ll keep thinking about how to define “lavish” while I make “generosity” the label for my mid-point here.

No compromise

We could probably name dozens of opposite pairs begging for balance: work and home, self and others, drunkenness and abstinence, service and self-care. Add them to the chart here and decide how you find the middle ground for each.

Meanwhile, we must mention one area where balance is to be avoided. God told Moses, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” Those repeated “all’s” leave no wiggle room, allow no compromise, and know nothing of talk about balance.

But here’s the interesting fact about this all-or-nothing command. As we do better obeying it, we’ll discover many of our other problems with balance fading into the background. That makes devotion to God the first and best balancing act we can pursue, far more important than any perfect gymnastics routine.

 Photo by Wesley Carvalho from Pexels

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