Unbalanced

There are more than a few things about me that leave my friends shaking their heads in amusement. Peculiar little rituals or rules that just don't seem to make any sense.

For example, I can't eat anything off of any wooden utensil. It makes me shiver just to think of it. I was a sad little school girl for many years on cafeteria-ice-cream-day. You know how those little cups of vanilla delight come...with a little wooden "spoon" taped neatly on the top? Couldn't do it. Couldn't eat off that thing no matter how much my mouth watered.

I also can't eat meat that is wrapped in paper. Now this was not a big deal until I moved to Wisconsin. I hadn't even SEEN meat wrapped in paper until then. My husband gives in to me, thank goodness, but he often tells me that we are getting worse meat at a worse price because of my little oddity. But at least I can see my meat as it sits in the freezer. No surprises there.

Another one of my peculiarities came to light as I sat at a large table during my Bible study. Two tables had been pushed together to form a large square. I sat at the lower right hand corner, Rebecca sat close to the lower left hand corner, Minda sat at the top left corner, and.....no one sat across from her. The upper right hand corner was empty.

I tried to ignore it. I did! But soon my foot began to tap; then my fingers started to twitch. Soon I'd had all I could stand, and hoping that I wasn't going to offend Heather, who was sitting next to me, I raced to the empty corner of the table, sitting down and offering a quick explanation that I just couldn't have the table be unbalanced.

I like symmetry. I love balance. I like to know that all my corners are filled and neatly in line. My mother in law underestimates the depth of this need when she tells me that off-center is the "in" thing. She doesn't realize that by placing my television on the left hand side of the wall, she is all but asking me to never enter my living room again. I just can't handle it.

As we were joking about my neurosis during my Bible study on Tuesday, my friend Linda Kuechle suggested that I blog about being unbalanced, and how being unbalanced in our relationship with God can leave us just as shaken and uncertain as I felt with that table.

I had never thought of it in that way, but she was totally right. When I spend more time watching television, or talking on the phone, or using the computer, than I do with God; I am unbalanced. I may not physically topple over, but my spiritual walk will not be straight.

Most of the time when we want to balance something, we need to make each side even. Everything has to weigh the same. That's not the case with us. God calls us to place Him as our first priority, our spouses second, our children third, and our other commitments can fall in place from there. That is how we will be balanced. We need to place most of our weight with God, because He gives us the strength to do all the other things.

I am seeing the fruit of truly doing this for the first time. I've always talked about doing it, always known that it is the way it SHOULD be done, but now I am actively seeking to balance myself by putting God first. And I can tell you that it's true...everything else gets a little bit easier.

There are going to be times in our life where we are going to feel unbalanced, there's no getting around that fact. But with most of our weight placed with God, we'll never tip over.