Paul Prather

3 min read ⭑

In my observation, core spiritual truths are applicable to nearly every arena of life, not just to religion but also to business, education or politics. They’re as beneficial to those who don’t believe in God as to those who go to church three times a week.

I think of these as universal laws. They’re woven into the world we inhabit as surely as the law of gravity.

One of these universal truths is the principle of balance.

Years ago, when I was studying at a media institute in Florida, several participants were enjoying a day off at a beach near St. Petersburg.

One of the guys had brought along his kayak, and he asked if I’d like to try it out. I’d never been in a kayak before.

“Sure,” I said. It looked easy and fun.

I climbed into the vessel and paddled away from shore — but I leaned too far to the right. Suddenly the kayak tipped over and I found myself upside down in the ocean.

I extricated myself, popped to the surface and dragged the kayak back toward the beach. I climbed in again and started paddling away, being careful not to lean to starboard.

You know what happened next. I overcompensated. I hadn’t gone 20 yards before I capsized to the left and found myself underwater a second time, gurgling and thrashing my way to the surface.

I learned something that day that’s stuck with me: You can fall out of a kayak on either side.

To me, it’s a metaphor for just about every situation in life. If you stay balanced you can have a comparatively pleasant journey. Lean too far in any direction and you’ll pay the piper.

Punish your children too harshly, demand too much from their studies, brook no dissent and you’ll end up producing cowed, perfectionist, resentful young adults. But indulge them too freely, ignore their school performance, try to be their bestest buddy and you’ll end up raising undisciplined, ignorant, entitled nitwits. The best course lies in the middle — you create healthy but not stifling boundaries, clear yet reasonable expectations and a benevolent but never equal relationship in which you remain the parent until the child grows up.

Or think about diet and exercise. If you cut your food intake to 1,000 calories a day and start pumping iron and running marathons on that diet, you’ll lose weight, but you’ll also destroy your body. On the other hand, start gobbling down 4,000 calories of donuts a day and never move from your sofa — and you’ll destroy your body. What you need is a balance between those extremes.

Consider our country’s political situation. Some scholars and commentators think American democracy is on its last legs. We’re arguably more polarized than we’ve been at any time since just before the Civil War, although I remember the 1960s and ‘70s as having been pretty bad. Congress is marred by gridlock and partisan one-upmanship if not fanaticism. Both sides are manipulated by angry lunatic fringes who’ve taken leave of all common sense.

I once wrote a piece in which, if memory serves, I suggested it might be productive if we returned to a thoughtful, middle-of-the-road approach. We could civilly discuss the pros and cons of a given issue and hash out compromises that incorporated the best points of each party’s views (you know, the way a democracy is supposed to work, and occasionally has).

I’m by nature a middle-of-the-roader, I added.

A reader voiced his irritation.

“The only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill,” he wrote.

The Bible argues in favor of balance — even in matters of faith and morality, surprisingly enough.

Here’s a passage I like from Ecclesiastes 7: “Do not be excessively righteous or show yourself to be unduly wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Do not be excessively wicked or act like a fool. Why should you die before your time? It would be best for you to hold on to one and not let go of the other.”

The implication is there’s a healthy balance to be found among righteousness, wisdom, wickedness and foolishness. We’re all combinations of those traits. We’d do well to maintain a bit of humility and realism about that.

If I were going to err, I’d hope to err of the side of righteousness and wisdom. I mean, it’s easy to see why wickedness and foolishness are dangerous. But so are the other two, the biblical scribe it’s telling us. Righteousness and wisdom easily veer into self-righteousness and arrogance, which in their worst manifestations are as evil as any other sins.

Lord, help us strike a wise balance in all things.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.

This article is republished from Religion Unplugged under a Creative Commons license.

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