Balance: Avoiding the Extremes
IT’S BEEN FAR TOO LONG since I’ve posted on this blog—since before the year-end holidays last year. So I’m overdue to add a second item in my list of the personally “Most Helpful Spiritual Insights I’ve Found” through the decades of my life.
This time, I want to speak briefly to the vital importance of BALANCE.
It’s not just of critical importance to tight-rope walkers and accountants tallying assets against liabilities. It’s vital too in what we accept as true in our Christian lives.
Some areas where things can easily get out of balance:
- Faith versus works
- Liberty versus license
- Grace versus legalism
- Head versus heart
- Quality versus quantity
- Justice versus mercy
- Fanaticism versus indifference
- Behavior versus relationship
Each of us is doubtless somewhere on the continuum for each of these pairs. And the more we’re balanced in our thinking and behavior, the better for us in our spiritual walk.
The enemy loves to get people so far to one side that they drive straight into the ditch on one side of the road or the other. But unlike driving a car—where in the U.S. it’s safer to be on the right side, or in Europe where it’s safer on the left—the best place for any of us spiritually is in the center of the road. Extremes on either side can be fatal not only to our spirituality but ultimately, to our eternal destiny.
It’s all too easy in life to “discover” truth for oneself—or to accept what we are taught—then adamantly, dogmatically cling to it, refusing to consider other ways of seeing things, closing our minds to anything new or different.
It’s fine to assemble and personalize our beliefs as we travel through life, but remember too what we all do when driving. We constantly make little moves, right or left, on the steering wheel, even on long, straight roads. We constantly make small “corrections” in the direction of our travel. If we did not do this, we’d soon end up straying off the road into the ditch.
We must constantly be doing the same with our personal belief system—making small (or sometimes even very large) corrections, lest we drift into the ditch. I’ve personally had to alter many things through the years that I once believed as a youth or young adult.
Just as the six blind men, each touching a different part of the elephant, were certain they knew the elephant was like a leaf, or a snake, or a tree, or a wall—yet each was “partly in the right” but all were ultimately wrong—we too must not be so proud that we stubbornly cling to our understanding of truth and foreclose ever altering it.
Balance.
Staying away from the extremes on either side.
One of the best lessons I’ve ever learned.
