A balancing act in a confusing world
On the menu today: food for thought and possibly some thought-provoking call to action if a shift in gears is needed. The overarching theme, the thread that runs through the Sparkles and fairy lights podcast is #balance. Indeed, it is why I started with hormones that were out of balance; it was critically important to me and I wanted to spread #awareness. I may have changed tack a bit, but essentially we are still looking at how to maintain balance in our lives, albeit moving from clear, distinct physical characteristics to the heart and mind.
Why is balance important?
To be quite frank, I have intensely been reflecting on balance for a considerable time now, especially of late. Life is filled with challenges, around every corner it seems, and a measured approach with much discernment is needed to navigate the way forward. I have specifically been pondering what it means to have balance, why it is important and the fact that when one is said to be out of kilter, balance or sync; it is never a good thing. Somehow, order is not maintained and sometimes there are rather serious repercussions too.
Synonyms for balance include stability, equilibrium, steadiness, fairness, justice, impartiality, symmetry, scales, harmony and tension and these all help us to understand how important balance is and why having a balanced approach is vital. In addition, I considered the idea of lines being drawn and crossed.
I thought of why people go to #war, most recently of Russia and Ukraine, now nearly a year on, just how senseless it is and why it started in the first place. As usual, one country believed it had the right to invade and cross another’s borders wreaking much havoc as a result. It is the same with #limits we set in our lives and hearts, if we allow others to encroach on our lives, hearts, minds and all we hold dear; it causes a disruption, whether we have allowed them to or not.
A vivid depiction!
As I knuckled down to write this, I happened on something unimaginable and truly awful. It was 6 February and I had started off the day as usual. I quickly opened the socials and was met with scenes of ghastly devastation from the #earthquake in Türkiye. My heart absolutely broke when I saw the flattened buildings in which residents, probably sound asleep at the time, had surely succumbed to the disaster, oblivious to the danger that would overtake them. The magnitude of the situation quickly became evident as well as the fact that the loss of life would be immense.
As people huddled together in the cold, deeply in shock, waiting for the first rays of dawn to appear, they were probably even more traumatised by what daylight revealed – the incredible scale of the deadly disaster. I could not help but shed tears. My heart was wracked with #pain for the #loss of lives and for the people who were trapped in rubble who were going to be scarred by this for life one way or another and some would have to come to terms with life-altering injuries.
Aftershocks were predicted to last for days, if not weeks. It wasn’t long before another shallow, yet deadly earthquake struck in the same area, a mere 12 hours later. Unprecedented! Haunting! Stark visuals just kept coming. The death toll sky-rocketed and early on, it seemed as though it would be the region’s watershed moment, its own 9/11. A day when everything changed.
The BBC reported as follows: “It was a big earthquake – registered as 7.8, classified as “major” on the official magnitude scale. It broke along about 100km (62 miles) of fault line, causing serious damage to buildings near the fault.”
The report continued: “The Earth’s crust is made up of separate bits, called plates, that nestle alongside each other. These plates often try to move but are prevented by the friction of rubbing up against an adjoining one. But sometimes the pressure builds until one plate suddenly jerks across, causing the surface to move. In this case it was the Arabian plate moving northwards and grinding against the Anatolian plate.”
According to the British Geological Survey: “Over time stresses in the Earth build up (often caused by the slow movements of tectonic plates). At some point the stresses become so great that the Earth breaks. An earthquake rupture occurs and relieves some of the stresses (but generally not all).”
May we keep this wonderful country in our prayers. I was privileged to be there a few years ago, and I fell in love with it, so enchanting were the people and so extraordinary was their hospitality. Never will I forget it – it is probably why my heart was so torn.
Parallels drawn
As I tried to wrap my head around this, I drew parallels; it seemed to paint another picture for me in my #heart. Please bear in mind that I had been ruminating on the topic of lines, borders, boundaries, etc. for a while. As I sombrely watched more grim images, the mechanics of an earthquake somehow became clear – a rather graphic picture of #boundaries not being adhered to in day-to-day life presented itself, pressure building and eventually a ton of pent-up anger being released.
You see, boundaries are property lines showing where one property ends and another begins. In our lives, it means that each one of us is an autonomous human being and as individuals need to make decisions every day that concern the body we, as individuals, are living in as separate to the eight billion other people on the planet.
It is our responsibility to take care of our individual bodies so that we can have a healthy ecosystem where we can thrive as a collective; be it the nuclear family, within the extended family, the community and so on. You get the picture, but it starts with each one of us.
But what if we, as individuals, are unhealthy and cannot see the invisible lines where people can encroach on our #emotions and well-being. When we allow others to make decisions or do things that are not conducive for our lives but lack the will to say “no” when we need to.
From my own experience, I am all too well aware of the consequences of allowing others to walk over me when assertive I should be. I have really battled with being #assertive and I hate hurting people and will find a way to say “yes”, even to my own detriment. Well, not as much now as say when this thing really became an issue. Lessons have been learnt along the way, but there are still moments …
Help from a friend
Years ago, a respected, #Christian role model of the faith, Rhoda is her name, opened the Scriptures to me and pointed out a verse that is easily one that transformed me from that time onwards. I had never really heard about boundaries before – even though I had clear issues with them and that was probably the reason I had the problem in the first place, I simply was unaware. Boundaries had never been taught to me. I will tell you about the book of that name a bit later.
The verse she shared with me was Galatians 6:2-5 (New International Version)
2 Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. 3 If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. 4 Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else, 5 for each one should carry their own load.
Galatians 6:2-5
The penny dropped. It showed me where I often erred and I learnt that the Bible calls us to carry each other’s burdens. One carries burdens only for a short period of time. You help to carry a burden that your fellow believer, friend cannot carry alone for a set duration of time. Problems arise when one continues to do so when, by all accounts, one should have stopped.
Moreover, the Bible exhorts us to carry our own loads. So one is meant to carry what is associated with one’s life and only one’s life. One cannot carry the load another is supposed to carry. Therein lay the problem. I was carrying the load others were meant to, not just the occasional burden.
Introduced to Boundaries
That life-changing revelation then led to the untangling of years of getting this wrong and is still a major area I need to work on. But soon after that I was introduced to one of the most transformational books I had ever read – Boundaries by Dr Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsend.
I would like to quote how they define boundaries from their book; they clearly know a thing or twenty: “Any confusion of responsibility and ownership in our lives is a problem of boundaries. Just as homeowners set physical property lines around their land, we need to set mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries for our lives to help us to distinguish what is our responsibility and what isn’t.”
The passage continued, “… the inability to set appropriate boundaries at appropriate times with the appropriate people can be very destructive.” In addition, it expressed: “And this is one of the most serious problems facing Christians today. Many sincere, dedicated believers struggle with tremendous confusion about when it is biblically appropriate to set limits.”
“Misinformation about the Bible’s answers to these issues has led to much wrong teaching about boundaries. Not only that, but many clinical psychological symptoms, such as depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, addictions, impulsive disorders, guilt problems, shame issues, panic disorders, and marital and relational struggles, find their root in conflicts with boundaries.
“The book presents a biblical view of boundaries: what they are, what they protect, how they are developed, how they are injured, how to repair them, and how to use them.”
And did this book deliver. It was a revelation of seismic effect. Immediately, it became clear that I had zero understanding of what boundaries entailed. It was why, in an unequal society in South Africa, I allowed a gang of poor boys to cause me much distress on the streets as well as manipulate me into giving them money.
People who had no idea of my heart and motives were allowed to give me their unsolicited opinions about my character without having proper discernment. I then mistakenly took it to heart as truth and, thereafter, proceeded to beat myself up. In the process, I granted people permission to coerce me into doing things that were on their agenda and clearly were not right for me.
Most of them did not have bad motives, I don’t think, but I had no inkling of how to filter things out and keep the property of my heart safe and secure. My toe-the-line default setting emerged and I do not blame anyone; I see how I allowed people to cross the lines of my property at will, then found myself forced to bear the consequences.
I have seen this pattern in my own life, time and time again. Someone violates a boundary, I do not address it, I may or may not be upset or perturbed, at the individual or at least myself, and there may be some berating of my lack of assertiveness. Like an earthquake in the making, the tension builds over time. Whether a boundary has been set or whether one only suspects something is wrong is not the point, the point is pressure is building under the surface.
Outwardly, whether you or I, the smiles continue, we comply with others’ wishes, we easily acquiesce, we do what we believe is required of us and we are not honest about how we are really feeling when we people ask us. We may try to reason it away with logic or we are simply too afraid to say anything. Instead, we may merely prattle on that we are fine. In reality, we know something is boiling under the surface, often we do not know what it is either – we certainly don’t know how to articulate it, but we know something is wrong inside – it is white-hot and we have visceral reactions.
Finally, after repeated offences or boundary violations, there is an outburst of pent-up anger, not necessarily at a specific person and then remorse and sometimes, dire consequences. Then we do it again on repeat until we discover what the problem is. Some never really do. For me, the discovery of what it meant to have boundaries was nothing short of quite simply being one of the most important revelations I had ever had. Only to discover that the scale of boundary-less living in my life was off the charts.
The bad old days
Before that, way back in the old days, I had to deal with having mounting anger build up inside. I was so nice and oh so compliant to people because I did not want to be seen as a bad person and specifically a bad Christian.
Additionally, I would go out of my way to please people in a bid to be seen as a good Christian, someone who loved God and because I thought saying “no” to people would mean that I was selfish or it would be unlike what Jesus would do. And I wanted to imitate him so dearly. Whether Jesus would actually have done the things I ascribed to him is food for a whole other episode.
I got things twisted and as a result, the Christian call to deny the sinful nature was turned into a self-denial of everything in me and it was killing me – yes, I am exaggerating a tad to get your attention, but it felt as though I was; not just cutting away of the sinful nature.
The blessings and God-given qualities were being thrown out with the bathwater of my thinking. And I was staggering under the weight of it all. Ironically, it seemed as though my efforts were not even recognised as such, I was exhausted and something was clearly wrong with how I was doing life.
I felt bad when I tried to assert myself and heaven forbid, I did not want to step out of line as it seemed rude. It was a destructive cycle in which I found myself. AND I was angry – I know some of you probably are very assertive and do not relate to the shrivelling character that was me for so many years, but I am sure that there is a loved one out there who may also need to change a setting or two in their hearts.
After more pondering, I considered how we can be like sitting ducks when toxic people, the kind of which we have never dealt with before, enter our lives and are then we find ourselves completely unprepared and rendered virtually useless for the impending havoc that they can unleash in our lives. They expect us to toe the line or intentionally want to bring us in line with their agenda.
And out of habit, we often follow the line of least resistance. We just fall in line with what they want. I will be exploring some of these scenarios. At any rate, experience, wisdom and discernment help us to make good decisions and handle them better. It still happens that I get blindsided by a cunning, conniving human with ulterior motives, but not as often any more. Time has taught me to take a hard line on my commitment to boundaries and not allow individuals to upend it.
Balance in life is thus essential, but it is so hard to achieve. Thus I will be writing about balance in a new way. Not with such a heavy emphasis on perimenopause, but a focus on what, for lack of anything more concrete, I will call an unbalanced mindset. For it, too, has enormous consequence in our lives with bitter, far-reaching seismic effects.
I hope that you will go along on this journey with me as we explore these and there will be biblical lessons to boot. Though I am not qualified as a psychologist, nor a theologian, nevertheless, I still hope to share the biblical principles and life lessons I have learned over time. The bottom line of this is the hope that it will resonate with someone out there and that like I did, they, too, will have that Aha moment; a moment of EUREKA, we found the diamond of value in God’s Word on this.
It behoves me to say this: I deeply respect the people of Turkey and understand how traumatised they must feel by this unprecedented tragedy. Because I was so entranced by the beauty of Turkiye, I was so shocked to see all the heart-breaking images pouring out of from there. May we never forget that for some people, it represented the beginning of a nightmare that will have far-reaching consequences for decades, perhaps for ever.
I have thus had to tread a fine line in my attempt to draw this striking parallel while also respecting the dignity of the people amid the tragedy that has just unfolded. May I implore all of us to keep praying for the people of that beautiful land, Turkiye, as well as for the people of Syria who have together borne the brunt of this disaster.
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