Balance

A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, But a just weight is His delight. 
Proverbs 11:1​

I had a wonderful kindergarten teacher  named Mrs. Justice and she was a gem!  Seriously, if I can remember gobs of things about her after nearly a half century; lets face it, she must have been awesome!  I loved her laugh, her kindness and the way her room felt so much like home.  There was however one thing in our classroom that I hated…the balance beam.  The silly thing  sat just a couple inches off the floor but it terrified me.  I would step up on it and instantly begin to sway and stagger like I’d been drinking for a week.  Looking back I have no idea why I had such a lousy sense of balance. I’m sure I just thought too much about it and the lack of balance was all in my head but I still remember that confusing, out of control sensation.  

I haven’t been on a balance beam since kindergarten but I sure can relate to that same out of balance feeling for different reasons.  The funny thing is, when I was trying to walk on that silly beam, it was all my issue; I was the one responsible for that fuzzy, tippy feeling so all I had to  do was hop down and balance was restored.  Today it’s not so simple. Today the imbalance is usually served up at the  hands of others and it can make us a little crazy.

Fake news leads us to imbalance.  People with narrow minded, black and white “hell or high water”  thinking and speech can lead us to imbalance.  Companies or folks who only tell the slice of truth that helps them market their stuff lead us to imbalance.  Last week my school computer screamed at me and flashed warnings that it had been attacked by  some kind of trojan horse, worm, scorpion, flaming dragons virus thingy.  It scared the snot out of me!  I didn’t really want to work on Language Arts Curriculum in the first place but then to have my computer tell me that my credit cards and possibly my first born offspring were in danger (ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic!) made me feel a little out of balance.  It ended up being a pretty simple fix but as it turns out the voice coming from my computer wanted to sell me some kind of product to perfect my potentially attacked computer. Wasn’t that helpful of them!  Once I found out everything was ok, I breathed a sigh of relief and then I got a little irritated that it was so easy to be thrown off balance; I was right back in kindergarten facing down that silly balance beam.

After the whole virus debacle, I happened to find an article on a health and nutrition blog that outlined some of the fabulous things good black coffee can do for a person.  I of course agreed enthusiastically with every word and finished the article feeling very affirmed in my coffee habit.  Not two hours later, I was checking email and stumbled onto an article telling me my morning “nectar of the Gods” was going to have me lame, forgetful and sick as a dog if I didn’t dump it out and never take a sip again.  Of course I took that entire article as a big pile of horse pucky! Again though, I was surprised at how easy it is to loose our balance when everyone with a laptop or access to social media can flip the truth completely out of balance and leave us scratching our heads.

Since I’m not Queen of the Universe and I can’t control all the ridiculous stuff people like to spit out as truth, I had to give it some prayer and thought and this is what I came up with. Logic and common sense may seem to be a bit out of fashion but we can all make an effort to bring them back.  Think first; speak later (or not at all) seems to be a good idea sometimes.  Don’t believe everything you hear (read) is sound advice. Trading media time for prayer time would be splendid for many reasons.  The final thing; it’s a big one…pray for balance and truth.  We get so sucked in to the craziness but what if we just didn’t.  What if we refrained from replying to something just so we can have our voice heard.  It just might be better for the whole planet if we worried more about simply having our voice heard by the Father who gave us that voice cause I’pretty sure he didn’t give it to us and instruct us in scripture to “go forth and make an ugly, controversial, half baked truthful noise”.  When all else fails, do what I did in kindergarten when that silly balance beam threw me off balance…just hop off and go do something better!

A Seed To Plant: The next time you encounter something that throws you off balance, stop right then and there and pray for the person or folks at the root of it.  Something mighty will happen if we all get a little better at that!

Blessings on  your day!