One of the hardest things to do in life is to keep it balanced. We must balance family life and work, friends and family, balance oneself, or even the checkbook. One may even say life is a balancing act. This “balancing act” transmits into our faith just as it does into the rest of our life. Oswald Chambers comments on the balance between honoring God and serving Him. He mentions how we, as Christians, can become to obsessed with trying to serve God and often lose sight of our purpose, to worship Him. God created us to love and praise Him. While we worship him in multiple ways, we need to branch out to other types of praise as well. For me personally, I am, what is called, a naturalist. I worship God by marveling at his creation and love being immersed in it, particularly stars. However, I have the hardest time worshipping him any other way. I hate singing praise songs, I never focus on serving for God rather than for me, and I keep forgetting to have quite times. I am very unbalanced in my Christian life and so are many college kids. All the pressure for us to try our best just takes up all our time. We spend hours studying, working, and volunteering so that we can leave college ready for the real world, but in all this we forget how important God is and that he wants us to spend time with him instead of spending time for him. Again we have to be cautious and not spend all our time with him instead of for him. Our life requires a careful balance between these two.
1) Can anyone actually be successful?
2) If we don’t live/ believe the words in a “praise” song, should we still sing it or should we keep silent at that line?
Your post really makes me think. I see where you are coming from, and I can tell that you are wrestling with the ideas in the book, but I want to seriously question the dichotomy of balancing one's life between two undesirable extremes. I think that Christians in general need to get away from the idea of "balance." Maybe we need to start asking ourselves, "What is central?" instead of "What two things do I need to balance?" I think the danger of this second question is that we can get caught up in over-analysis and lose sight of what is central: Jesus. Surely the Christian life is much simpler (and, ironically, much harder) than a juggling/balancing act.
ReplyDeleteJust some thoughts. Take them or leave them.