One of the first realizations that I had when I started trying to discover why I had such a hard time living life to the fullest is that I had lived my whole life chasing extremes.
Granted I come from a family that does just about everything all or nothing – whether it is playing or working. I can remember games that lasted long into the night that were being played just out of sheer competitiveness. I can also remember times of “spring cleaning” where we have even been know to polish plant leaves and clean decorative parts of furniture with Q-tips.
At first, I thought that the problem was going to extremes. Then I realized that much of life is about extremes we have no control over – the terrible drought that pretty much the whole state of Texas is enduring right now came to mind on this one! Even the section in Ecclesiastes that talks about balance in life is really a list of extremes – a time to laugh and a time to cry, etc.
So, if God works in extremes, why does it feel like life is so out of kilter when I am chasing extremes? I realized that the answer to that was that I never balanced one extreme with its opposite extreme.
If I was exercising, I was exercising in every spare minute of my day and was leaving no time for the “extreme” in the other direction of taking time to rest and letting my body rejuvenate after the exercise.
If I was “organizing”, everything else had to stop because it was such a monumental ordeal – and yet I never seemed to make it past the first room or two – I was just reorganizing the same junk every time I went on an organizing binge and while on this binge, everything else fell terribly behind until I would move to the next thing that cried urgently for my attention and then “the house will just have to wait”.
As I have worked through this and seen that extremes are okay and sometimes God takes us through the extremes of life whether it is the mountaintop experience of a time of close fellowship with Him or walking through the valley of the shadow of death, I have come to realize that the real truth I need to wrap my mind around is that there is always a balance for an extreme.
This will be something that I am sure I will have to work towards for the rest of my days here on earth and will only truly achieve when I reach Heaven. However, I feel that working towards balance will help make me a much more pleasant person to be around!