How do I balance?

(pinterest)

When I was small, still playing on playgrounds and wearing pink overalls, my favorite playground apparatus was the seesaw. A friend and I would try any number of tricks to try to defeat balance and gravity, but no matter how long we could keep that solid board parallel to the ground below us, inevitably it would begin tipping one way or the other. Perfect balance was impossible.

For years the concept of balance has irked me. When I would stand on one of my certain soapboxes and someone older and wiser, or younger and more naive, than me would begin to laud the importantance of balance, I would check out. Balance is sissy to me.

I like the idea of zen, order, some sort of divine knowledge that the universe can be steadied by my efforts and meditations.

But the truth?

The truth is that nothing about the faith I've been adopted into is balanced.

What we're saying when we say we need to be balanced is that we need to not offend, or not be radical, or not be too much of any one thing, that everything must taste good, feel good, and not be irksome in order to keep balance in the world. What we're saying is we've got to keep that seesaw parallel to the ground beneath us, or we'll come crashing down with a pounding thud.

Like the hill at Golgotha, when a broken, bleeding man dropped his head and the sky went dark, the veil tore in two. A pounding thud.

Quiet.

Because balance was broken.

One man took the wrath for a limitless number of us.

Complete imbalance.

So when we ask that question "where is the balance?" I'll tell you where it is:

Nowhere.

It doesn't exist. Balance was broken. And what you're searching for is not a parallel board, hovering peacefully above the earth and all its brokenness, what you're searching for is Jesus.

Perfectly imbalanced Jesus.