Balance, in my past seven years as a pastor and a mother, has always seemed to me to be both elusive and unrealistic. After all, balance assumes that the items you have to balance can all fit together on a scale, in a manageable amount.
Balance accepts that you can always hold a portion of yourself in reserve–that you can divide your identity into equal and piecemeal parts. Maybe what modern women need most today then is not balance at all, but rather permission to be occasionally unbalanced.
That’s what Jesus asked of those who would follow him: to deny all else, even family, and take up your cross for the sake of a mission of love, forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation.
This New Year, the 20th anniversary of the New Millennium, I want to say, “You have the right to be unbalanced.”
This message is an excerpt from “The grace of an unbalanced life” by Angela Denker in the January 2020 issue of Cafe.
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