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Exposing
the 'Balance' myth
by
Captain
Danielle Strickland
When a man asks
himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man
of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you
must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is
satisfied with thinking.
Georges Clemenceau
The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life,
acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can
do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC)
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from
without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883 - 1955)
Rational and ordered (humanly) lives have given way to the
ideal of a ‘balanced’ life. This was first impressed upon my
young life when I returned from a mission trip to Africa. My
mother had broken a dish and declared it time for a new set
(there were several now missing) and then it began. I started
to wail and mourn the injustice of the world and the ways her
spending would contribute to extreme poverty and the deaths of
several African children in the hour. I said we should all eat
off of the table to teach us the gift of our own wealth when
finally my mother had had quite enough. She looked me in the
eye and declared the thing she knew I needed more than
anything else, balance. There it was. The subject of balance
seems to be an insatiable search of our society. Balance is
defined as ‘a state of equilibrium’. Leadership books are full
with the idea of achieving a balanced state. It’s a bit like
happiness – and probably intimately related since balance is
thought to bring nothing but bliss. Balance. It seems my
mother had sensed intuitively that I was ‘off my rocker’ and
headed to an extreme state where disorder might reign and
knowledge might give way to confusion and clarity to doubt and
consistency to despair. Now, to be fair, my mother was just
suggesting a cultural norm. Balance is a societal practice and
a mother’s natural desire for her child. She truly wanted me
to live a better life. The problem of course exists in what
‘better’ is. Like happiness, perhaps balance isn’t an
achievable status or state but a place we visit on occasion?
In seminary (training college in my tradition) we learned
balance was a place where compartments stayed clean. That is,
you kept your work at your office, and your family time
sacred, and your own ‘self’ time in tact, and that should do
it. It would always follow that the seminarians would agree
with God first, family second, and ministry third. This is, of
course, the hierarchy of balance. This sounds fantastic in a
textbook and in a training school where someone else looks
after your kids, cooks your meals and tells you what to wear
everyday. The problem with balance only exists when there is
none- when your work is your home, your family is your church,
and your ‘self’ time is not your own anymore. Then we become
‘unbalanced’ and are destined to a life of chaotic
unhappiness. Or maybe there is another option.
Henri Nouwen crafted a theology framed around the Circus.
(Ford, 2002) He used the example of the flying trapeze
artists. The most important member of the trapeze team is the
catcher. He’s the one you can’t see.
If we are to take risks, to be free, in the air, in life,
we have to know there’s a catcher. We have to know that when
we come down from it all, we’re going to be caught, we’re
going to be safe. The great hero is the least visible. Trust
the catcher (pg. 22).
True balance in the team is only achieved when one flying
member completely lets go of the swing and is suspended in the
air, reaching for the hands of the catcher. That is the
picture of balance for the trapeze team. Right there, each is
doing his part. The picture of completion is when the person
is caught… but the balance part, that’s when everyone in the
picture is participating in his role. Liken this to our lives
with God. God is the catcher. I am the trusting flying artist
whose job it is to completely thrust my whole life into midair
in order to create ‘balance’ to the order of our team. My
‘balance’ part looks completely mad- chaotic you might say.
But in the bigger picture of cosmic proportions and my place
in the created world – it is the only sane and ‘orderly’ thing
to do. Chaos may seem like it’s reigning in the brief time my
life is suspended over the air called ‘earth’ and my time
here. But it is a life that is lived out with trust in the
mighty catcher called Christ who ultimately brings completion
that makes balance real. This is what Oswald Chambers called,
‘reckless abandon’ and what Kierkegaard called the ‘leap of
faith’. It is a completely suspended life over the chaos of
time in order that I might be caught by the Catcher of all.
This kind of balance is the kind that is born from chaos, not
order. It is born not in orderly systems and neat compartments
but from faith, messy doubts, lived out theology, diaper
changes, regrets, relationships, and community.
So, when my door buzzer rang at 11:30pm this very night in the
middle of this chapter, I didn’t want to answer it. But
something (or Someone) nudged me to get over the
compartmentalized time of my ‘writing’. I answered the door
and found a lost friend who had decided to come home. Can you
imagine the thought of exposing the ‘balance myth’ by not
answering the buzzer when it rang at the wrong time? That’s
the exposure right there. That’s the point of it. This chapter
is not a separate part of my life, but a seamless garment of
experience, knowledge and insight that is my existence. To
write it apart from my life would be to give way to a modern,
compartmentalized, boring, albeit probably more properly
written, piece of ideal thinking. But to write it between
conversations, and on airplanes beside slobbering sleeping
people, and with my son trying to push buttons on my laptop
and after buzzer interruptions – that’s the congruency of
suspended balance. That’s when I decided to expose the balance
myth by throwing my life in the air expecting God to catch me.
And He does. And when He does, it’s a glorious event. It’s a
life of abandon, wild with freedom, reigning with suspended
truth and full of chaotic order, you might just call it
‘Divine Order’. It feels chaotic and Divine at the same time.
Even though my life may be seemingly chaotic – chaos itself is
most likely a foreign concept to God. We see chaos because we
do not see everything. God looks at the same situation and
sees order because He sees everything.
Exposing the balance myth is important for leaders in chaotic
environments because it frees us from the restraint and
constant fear that we are somehow losing ground by being
passionately committed to people. Rejecting the balance myth
is key to leading out of relationships that can feel chaotic.
Being available, open, honest, transparent, real, and needy
isn’t easy.
We were welcoming some new people into our community recently.
In the welcome prayer meeting for them we went around the
circle and asked people to give them some lessons they had
learned about community. Among the suggestions was to lose the
idea of trying to be ‘perfect’ before letting people in. This
is how leadership happens in a ‘balanced’ place. Perhaps it’s
easier to say that we must appear ‘perfect’ and ‘balanced’ in
order to let anyone in. How many people do you know who won’t
have someone over for dinner because their house isn’t
perfectly neat? I know many. Another suggestion was to be
vulnerable with your need. Someone who is living a ‘perfectly
balanced’ life doesn’t need much help. And because they don’t
need help, they don’t ask for it and that process creates
boxes that people live in. Isolation results in a perfectly
balanced lifestyle. That is the opposite of an unbalanced
chaotic embrace of leadership. My life is tough to manage and
I need lots of help. Asking for it is one of the ways I reject
the balance myth in order to create leadership that is
authentic and chaotic but produces an exciting and Divine
Order.
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