Living Life Out of Balance

Seems like I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflecting the last few weeks on the balance in my life. It began in the weeks leading up to Catalyst - capping with about a week of late nights working on tying up Catalyst site launches. Then our 10 Catalyst house guests arrived and the adrenaline carried me through for a few more days. After the conference came and went, though, I crashed… hard.

It has taken me a good week or two to feel like myself again. I’ve finally got caught up on my sleep, but I still feel out of balance. It’s this imbalance that feels like it is driving me to get back into a rhythm in my life, and this process is something that can be difficult. I feel off-kilter.

I think God created us with a need for rhythm in our lives. There is a healthy tension that we find when following Him. The border line between our own will and His; between fruitfulness and abiding; between work and rest.

Mike Breen does a good job of describing this need for balance in The Passionate Church that I read this summer. He describes it as a semicircle.

If you look at your life as a swinging pendulum, there needs to be a healthy balance between the work and rest in our lives. In fact, God not only designed us with the need for this balance He also modeled it: in His own life and in the life of Jesus. There are healthy, God-given patterns of balance that will enable us to live the life He intended us to live without the burnout, stress, and exhaustion that can come from a journey fueled by our own energy.

I think most of us realize we need rest, but we have this idea that rest serves its purpose when we take time to rest from work. We work full-force for six days of the week and then take it easy on the seventh in an effort to re-cooperate. The way that God designed us, however, was not to rest from our work, but to work from our rest. God uses times of abiding and pruning to build into us what He needs in order for us to be fruitful when we work - not the other way around.

So I’m slowing down, but I’m finding it difficult to pull my mind and energy away from a work mentality. I believe God is drawing me into a time of abiding and ‘being’, if I can take the time to set aside my drive to ‘do.’

Posted 10.24.2008

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