A Balancing Act

DAILY BYTE

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to achieve a balanced lifestyle? First up, you have to ensure that you get enough sleep – that’s about 8 hours of your day gone straight away. Then you have to fit in good hygiene, sensible eating and a natty dressy sense, all on top of work or studies and the many other daily commitments we seem to have.

But I haven’t even finished yet because then we still need to fit in some exercise, although I’ve always loved Winston Churchill’s comment that the only exercise he ever got was serving as a pallbearer for all his friends who died while exercising.

The point is that life can be so relentlessly demanding and busy that it is easy to lose all sense of perspective. Balance seems impossible. Recently, a journalist wrote an article on this, and interviewed experts in various different fields such as physical fitness, vocational life, relationships, sleep and so on.

All of these experts were asked to list how much time a person needs to devote in their particular area to just get by ... not to be a master in it, but the bare minimum. How much time do we actually need to sleep? What time should we be devoting to our career? How much exercise do we need to sustain these busy lifestyles?

Well, the journalist totaled all those amounts, and they added up to 40 hours per day! Experts tell us that is the minimum amount of time we need to spend just to get by! This is why life sometimes seems like one big balancing act – an act that we never quite get right.

Which is why the business of finding life balance is actually big business! Motivational speakers, lifestyle mentors and time management consultants all make lots of money telling us how to achieve balance in our busy, busy lives. (And you know they have balance because they can afford to hire good help!)

But is a balanced lifestyle actually the key to a better life that we all seem to think it is? In fact, biblically speaking, balance is not actually an adequate goal to devote our lives to.

This is because the quest for balance can contribute to a tendency to compartmentalise our faith. Often a balanced life is pictured as a pie chart with live divided into 7 or 8 slices, with one labeled ‘financial,’ another ‘vocational,’ and so on, with one of those slices being reserved for ‘spiritual.’

This kind of thinking encourages us to see matters like finances or work as ‘non-spiritual’ activities. It blinds us to the fact that God is intensely interested in every moment and activity. It limits and restricts God.

This is why we will spend the rest of this week investigating the topic of balance from a faith perspective. We will be considering whether Scripture offers us another perspective in terms of managing our daily stress and busyness.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Gracious God, I ask that you would guide me into a clearer understanding of what it means to be ‘balanced’ by you. I ask that you would speak to me, guide me and shape me. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Psalm 118 : 8 NRSV

It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in mortals.