Contents

Introduction

1. Balance: What Is It?

2. Spelling It Out

3. Me, Myself, and I

4. Being Married

5. Motherhood

6. Home Sweet Home

7. Getting Out of the House

8. The Blessing of Friends

9. Money Matters

10. Taming the Tongue

11. Moods: Yep, I’m Going There

12. Miscellaneous

13. Making It Work

Acknowledgments

Notes

1

Balance: What Is It?

A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight.

Proverbs 11:1

I always loved the playground when I was a kid. That sandy-colored packed dirt on the ground and kids who were willing to play with one another even if they had never met before. Of course, this was in the ’70s when all playground equipment was made of metal and there were no child safety laws in place. I’m surprised more of us didn’t die from scrapes filled with rust and metal shavings.

The teeter-totter (aka, seesaw) was a favorite of my brother’s and mine. We would take our places on the ends of the board and start pushing off with our legs, trying to hit the ground as hard as we could in an effort to make the other one fall off. It didn’t matter that when we hit, it jarred our backs and hurt our behinds. No amount of personal pain could distract from the fun of the whack that jostled the opposite person to a near fall (I am starting to understand why I now need to see my chiropractor so often). Plus, we knew the payoff would come seconds later when it was our turn to go flying upward and hang on for dear life.

On the days my brother wasn’t there to totter with me, I liked to stand in the center of the seesaw and try to balance. I would take a wide stance with a foot on either side of center and see if I could make the board level. This was particularly appealing to me because it felt like something I could master. It was a simple, personal, yet deeply important challenge. Just me and that long board working together to accomplish something that, in my seven-year-old mind, no one else in the whole wide world had ever been able to do: achieve perfect balance.

I haven’t been on a playground teeter-totter for many years now, but the image flashes into my mind frequently as I go through my life. The ups and downs; sometimes in life I am alone, sometimes with a friend. Occasionally there is someone on the other end who is not-so-playfully trying to knock me off. I go up, I go down, and in the end my behind hurts, but I still want to do it again tomorrow.

If only balance in life were as simple to achieve as in a childhood game.

About Falling

What is funny is that while I am not writing this book to talk about physical balance, I do have a tendency to fall over. I don’t know what causes it; I don’t get dizzy or have any warning. I just topple. When I see children fall, which they do on a daily basis, they just pop back up and keep running. But at my age, if I fall, it is two weeks of limping plus an extra ten days of complaining before I am moving at full speed again.

Falling is part of life. Maybe it’s more a part of mine than it is yours, but we all fall down and have to find ways to steady ourselves occasionally. We can try to be graceful, but it really doesn’t work. The grace comes in when you are finding ways to recover. It’s in laughing at yourself, forgiving yourself and other people, dusting yourself off, and trying again. The example you set for others isn’t in the fact that you fell, but in how you joyfully recovered and kept going.

In her book Bittersweet, Shauna Niequist talked about recovering from a hard time like this: “It’s easy to want to give up under the weight of what we’re carrying. It seems sometimes like the only possible choice. But there’s always, always another choice, and transformation is waiting for us just beyond that choice.” ¹

Nonphysical Balance

Fortunately, this book is about balance in other areas of life, such as marriage, motherhood, and money. These are also places where I fall occasionally, but I have found ways to get back up and keep moving, make improvements, and do better the next time. I don’t have to pretend to be okay because I know that everyone messes up or gets hit with unexpected problems. I know where to turn to get back on my feet, and I want to share that with you.

Falling, getting up, trying again, over and over, is how we learn. We can’t come out of the womb knowing how to balance a bank account or be a good friend. We learn over time from our mess-ups and mistakes. When we were babies, we learned to walk because our bodies and minds taught us how to lean slightly left when we started to fall right, and eventually it became instinctive. Then we moved on to the next challenge and so on until we were adults. But the learning didn’t stop when we hit eighteen. I know I have changed a lot in my adult years, far beyond learning how to walk. I learned how to handle broken relationships and how to control my spending and where to let go in my mothering when I felt like hanging on. I have learned to deal with emotional breakdowns and to take care of a home that sometimes seems like it is falling apart. I am constantly changing and finding better balance.

What Balance Is Not

Before I talk more about what balance is, I want to share some things that we are not trying to achieve.

It Is Not about Perfection

We get this idea in our heads that if we are perfectly balanced then our lives are perfect. But that isn’t possible no matter how many good choices we make or how hard we try. Perfection is a product of our imagination and watching too many Disney movies.

Being a princess with a castle and beautiful flowing hair is not my life, and I am guessing it’s not yours either. And I definitely don’t have magic potions to help me. Ain’t no fairy godmother gonna swoop in and give me until midnight to make my dreams come true. Nope, I have to work it, sister.

I urge you to also let go of the idea that anyone else’s life is perfect. Disney princesses and hair commercials aren’t real, and movie stars have problems. In case you haven’t seen any reality TV lately, famous people are more of a mess than we are most of the time. I promise you that no celebrity is always happy, always clean, always confident. They can’t be—just look at what people say about them in the magazines at the newsstands. It can’t be easy to read what the tabloids have to say about you and hear lies that people believe because they think they know you from seeing you in a movie. Friends, celebrities have the least “perfect” lives of all.

God tells us not to compare ourselves to others. All it does is feed lies to us for no reason!

Galatians 6:4 says, “But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor.”

Perfection is a joy stealer! We are going to shake off that idea and just be ourselves. You find your own level of balance and I will find mine and we can both be doing great. It’s a good thing to be different; otherwise, God would have just made a bunch of robots.

It’s Not about Control

If you spend your life trying to control every area in your world and, let’s face it, trying to control other people, you’ll be miserable. Self-control is good; life control is bad. As a reformed control freak, I can testify that letting go of your desire to have your own way is a blessing to everyone around you.

Webster’s 1828 dictionary says to control is “to overpower; to subject to authority; to counteract; to have under command.”

That is weighty! If you really look at what you are trying to control, you may discover that it is not something you have authority over in the first place. And to overpower? Man, that’s just exhausting.

I don’t want that. It says to God, “I don’t need You.” It minimizes my life to only what I can do for myself, when God is ready to give us so much more than that. I have news for you: you’re not always right. We have to accept that in order to stop trying to be in charge of everything. Believe me, I find myself trying to grab those reins back too often, and I have learned to stop myself and see how exhausting and unnecessary it is.

John Maxwell, a man I greatly admire, wrote about this so beautifully in his book Learning from the Giants: “Too often we are like a horse who allows his master to put a bit in his mouth, but then fights against it. What we don’t seem to understand is that if we allow God to have complete control of the reins in our life, He will stay with us continually, and He will guide us away from the danger, see that we are fed, and lead us back home—the very things Jacob longed for.” ²

I love analogies. My simple mind can understand them so much better than straight talk. I’m pretty sure God put all those parables in the Bible just for me; otherwise, I would not understand much of it on my own.

It’s Not about Staying in the Middle

No one wants a life of mediocrity—that would be boring! We learn from the lows and we expand in the highs, and we need those times to build a mature, experienced life.

The woman who stays in the middle can never grow into that wise, older woman God talked about in Titus 2. You need to mess up, you need to have suffering, you need those extreme highs to know what to reach for. I have read the entire Bible and I can’t find anything in it that I would consider “middle ground.” It is mostly suffering and trials mixed with the most triumphant victories in the history of the world.

Our comfy lives with remote controls and air-conditioning have lulled us into thinking that there is a zone we need to stay in to be happy. But it isn’t true! The only zone of true joy is wherever God has placed us. The balance is there, my friends, not in our Americanized comfort.

Lastly, It’s Not about a Formula That Works for Everyone

Not only are you and I different from each other, but the people in our lives are different, which makes an infinite number of possible problems and solutions. Yes, there are principles we can all follow, but the way it looks on you will be different than how it looks on me.

Not only does this eliminate pressure to try to live your life by someone else’s decisions, but it also removes the need to judge how other people choose to find their balance. Don’t misunderstand; I am not talking about sin or godliness. This is much different than that. This is about which direction you decide to take to reach the godly outcome you desire.

My husband and I are so opposite that we take a different route to almost every destination. When we pull out of the driveway to go to the grocery store, I turn left and he turns right, depending on who is driving. I’m not kidding. We have different goals for our travel. I like the scenic, pleasant route, and he likes the direct, boring, and lifeless path. Not that I’m judging him. The bottom line is that we both end up at the store at pretty much the same time and we get the shopping done (although don’t get me started on how opposite our shopping strategies are!). There is no wrong route to the store, and generally there isn’t a right or wrong way to find balance. Just stick with the principles I am going to give you and you’ll find a beautiful, unique, joy-filled path!

So What Is Balance?

Balance is quickly figuring out how hard to lean into the unexpected gust of wind so you don’t blow away. Sometimes we start to fall from being knocked over, even on purpose. There are ways to brace yourself. Lies, for example, can knock me down and make me want to go back to bed with my head covered for a week. But if I grab on to the truth and hang on, I can stay upright, then move on. The amazing thing about this is that we are frankly better off, wiser, and stronger for next time!

Balance is the result of an intentional reaction to an extreme situation. We are not slaves to our emotions and attitudes. We can actually be large and in charge of both our external responses and our internal responses.

Balance is looking at areas in your life that are not working and finding measurable, specific actions to change them. It’s one thing to decide to make changes, but if we don’t have a plan in place and ways to know if what we are doing is working, then it doesn’t work. Oh, it might help, but a measurable plan makes it so much better! I’m going to help you find easy, practical ways to do that. Believe in yourself. I believe in you!

You’re looking at your life right now and can likely pinpoint areas that you want to change. Maybe you are too emotional. Or perhaps you’re feeling like a failure as a mom, but your finances are doing pretty well and you have found balance in your service to the community. It’s a mix. The areas of a woman’s life that I am going to cover can each send us into orbit at times in our lives and make us desperate to feel secure again. Then when we get one thing pretty manageable, another issue pops up somewhere else.

That’s good. That is where you are supposed to be! Having nine children, I often say that there are always two kids who are causing me to really dig in and figure out how to help them and occasionally a third who is dealing with some less acute problems. But it has never been all nine at once. I consider that a gift from God. And by the way, it is not the same two each time. It varies, as if they are taking turns. Oh sure, a few of them seem to be on the high-need list more often than their siblings, but even my hardest kid isn’t always causing the struggle.

It’s the same with these areas of life. Most of you will be struggling with only two to three of these areas at a time. But eventually your life will hit a bump in each of them. Even if you’re not a mom or if you don’t have kids at home anymore, you will have kids to deal with—be it grandchildren or nieces and nephews or kids at church—and need to find ways to balance that for yourself. If you don’t own your home, you still have a space to manage and will have to figure out how to handle the ideas between what you want and what is actually available to you.