Day 27 Balance
The world
is a great big ferris wheel…spinning…each day is a new rotation…it does not
stop just because we have chosen to get off for a while. Or maybe it is a giant teeter totter…if you
crawl out to the middle….it just stops moving…or maybe your seesaw has stopped
because you are sitting on one side…your partner...your mate taken from
you. Your friends and family play on the
other side of the equipment…they ride in the vacant cars all around us…they see
that we are fragile…they feel sorry for us and let us do what we want. They can
see us on the teeter totter…but have no clue what to say to get us to climb to
the left or right…so we stay in our safe mode…we stay where we are and think we
are balanced!
Somehow
you must find the courage to get off that ride…to crawl back onto your side of
the teeter totter…to find the counter weight that returns the movement of your
life. The world misses us and wants to know that we have conquered our fear of
moving on. Our friends want to see us
happy again…playing in our world…building new lives that move us forward.
Job
struggled with this concept. As he
prayed to God toward the beginning of his trial…he asked desperately for
balance. In Job 6:2-4, (and I love the
NIV translation here) he wishes his grief were all but over…he feels the
darkness that surrounds those of us that have not found our way back to the
mainstream of life.
Job 6:2-4
New International Version (NIV)
2 “If only my anguish could be
weighed
and all my misery be placed on the scales!
3 It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas—
no wonder my words have been impetuous.
4 The arrows of the Almighty are in me,
my spirit drinks in their poison;
God’s terrors are marshaled against me.
and all my misery be placed on the scales!
3 It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas—
no wonder my words have been impetuous.
4 The arrows of the Almighty are in me,
my spirit drinks in their poison;
God’s terrors are marshaled against me.
Job
searches for many days for an answer…a way to move the teeter totter…to restore
it to its purpose. He finds it late in
Chapter 31…when he is tempted to lust after the flesh…
Job 31:6:
6Let me be weighed in an even
balance that God may know mine integrity.
Soloman, coined as the wisest man in the bible, must
have understood how restoring balance to your life brought happiness, he wrote
in Proverbs 11:1, “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just
weight is his delight.”
And
Amos….wow did he ever understand how wrong it is to deceive ourselves with our
own pain! He used the analogy of a ripe
basket of fruit…it rots if sits too long without being eaten. Oh how we…who
have seen a loved one taken from us…sometimes without warning…should understand
the brevity of this time we are granted on the Earth. Amos, in chapter 8, speaks these words of true balance,
“5Saying, When will the new moon be
gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat,
making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by
deceit?”
Even the
great king David, who fell with the eviliest of men, repented of his sin, and
recognized the need to put the sadness of our lives in the past, and move on.
He wrote so many wonderful Psalms to show us the way back…the way to get off
that ferris wheel…to inch our way off that teeter totter and begin to search
for life again. One of my favorites, Psalm 24:9 says, “Lift
up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the
King of glory shall come in.”
All we need to do is lift up our head…completely soaked with our tears. We need to lift up our face…makeup smeared in
places it was never meant to be. We need
to lift up our heart…torn apart…like the son of God as he died on the cross. Did you read the last part of the verse…the
part that says….and the King of glory shall come in? The King of glory…he comes to us…after we
lift up our face…and he dries our tears…he becomes our new partner on that
teeter totter! He sits on the other side and fills the empty seat…and he
breathes new life into our tired unbalanced life.
We will
wear ourselves out if we keep on that ferris wheel alone…we will crash from the
expenditure of so much energy. He is
that guy at the bottom of the wheel…he knows just when to stop the ride...to
hold out his hand and say… “come ye who are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest! God gave those
very words to Matthew…as he was reflecting on some of the precious moments he
had spent with God’s son Jesus. Oh what
joy must have flooded his soul as he remembered the words of the best friend he
ever had, and realized that the words he thought Jesus spoke to the lost…those
needing salvation….were also the key to letting go of his own grief.
Oh how he
must have struggled with the day to day battle of loss. Oh how his heart must
have longed to see his friend just one more time. Then…that epiphany…the words
flowing into his mind…and as he wrote he must have thought...I will come to
you…I will lift up my face and allow you to take me to new places. I will allow
you to place these wonderful stories of love on a scroll…so people can read it
…and be free from their pain. I just bet the original copy of Matthew was
stained with a few tears!
God is
like that….waiting till he knows we are ready to accept the words he places in our
hearts and minds…waiting till he knows we are brave enough to ask him to be our
partner…our life…our joy. Satan will trick us into leaving the seat next to us
empty…but God will call us daily to take up our new position….the task of
carrying his cross...his story to a world that is still hurting…cause they don’t
know him. The King of glory…he comes to
us…after we lift up our face…and he dries our tears…he becomes our new partner
on that teeter totter! He sits on the other side and fills the empty seat…and
he breathes new life into our tired unbalanced life.
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