One of the principles preached at my church is that balance is the key to life.

Anything done to the extreme is error.

This means that even good things, inappropriately pursued, can become bad

Exercising an hour a day will keep you healthy; exercising 12 hours a day may kill you.

Social time is vital for health, but a person who does nothing but hang with the group may not get much done. Likewise, the person who does nothing but isolate will likely suffer both emotionally and in their productivity.

Balance is the key to life.

Scripturally, we could look to Ecclesiastes 3:1, which says “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” It goes on to list a series of oppositional activities, each of which has its own appropriate time.

There is a time to weep and a time to laugh. Laughing at a funeral may get you in trouble. Weeping at a comedy club may make you seem strange.

Balance is the key to life. The journey to balance, however, may be messy.

In the January 12trh entry “Finding Balance” from Melody Beattie’s book of daily meditations on codependency “The Language of Letting Go,” Beattie observes people with a history of imbalanced relationships have a tendency to overcorrect when beginning to recover.

If, in times past, we took care of everyone but ourselves, we may respond by refusing to focus on anyone’s needs but our own.

If we have spent years suppressing our feelings, we may begin to hyperfocus on everything we feel.

If we have felt powerless, we may become tyrants.

None of these, however, are functional destinations. They are self-protective midpoints in the journey from bondage to freedom. Sure, focusing on our emotions is healthier than ignoring them, but exalting them over everything will create problems.

The problem is that balance takes time to achieve, because balance requires maturation. And maturity takes time to develop.

Hard 180s rarely provide lasting change.

We see this in our own natural responses to being hurt.

If we have a string of bad relationships, we may eventually swear off relationships altogether and declare that we are better off alone. Frequently, though, we have not found our heartbeat so much as found a way to stop the bleeding. And even then, it’s a tourniquet. And a tourniquet is an emergency measure to prevent you from bleeding out. If you leave it on for a few hours, you can cause nerve and tissue damage from which you will never recover.

If we choose long term isolation as a response to hurt, we can lose our ability to feel.

We think we are free, but we’re really just numb. And we are likely a little dead inside.

There is much more to say on this subject.

For today, I just pray that you will choose to feel something over feeling nothing, even if that something is bad.

At a low point in my early 20s that nobody could explain, a doctor was trying to encourage me to take Prozac, thinking it would help me with what he saw as chemical depression. 

A friend of mine, however, argued that I didn’t need it, saying, you don’t have chemical depression. You SHOULD be depressed; your life is bad.

I didn’t take the medicine. And while I don’t know what it would have done, I do know my life WAS bad, and eventually it got better. Eventually I got better.

i didn't need Prozac; I needed brain surgery. 

Sometimes we want to change our feelings, and we really just need to change.

So whether your struggle is spiritual, social, emotional, or physiological, I pray that you begin the process of change.

I pray that you find the balance you need.

And I pray that as you move from pain to power, and bondage to freedom, that you don’t hurt anybody, or yourself in the process.

The world is better the better you are.

(Photo Credit: Elisa Trivino)