The other day I had a few minutes to spare before meeting a friend for dinner so I ran into the library to see if I could find anything to help with my quest to perfection, and also to see if they had any fun piano music. I found a book by Emily Watts called Confessions of an Unbalanced Woman. It was a talk she gave at a Time Out for Women. I love Emily Watts. She has a great way of teaching principles and also keeping it light, fun, and real. She is a real person, striving to do the right thing. Because it's a talk it's a really quick read and after I got home from dinner I stood in my kitchen and started. She talks about finding the lack of balance in her life over a load of laundry. Socks, specifically. She spent a ton of time sorting socks, only to find out later that she was still getting mismatched socks and it was causing such frustration, her husband suggested that she make the kids do their own laundry so they'd have to sort their own socks. They began to teach their children at a pretty young age to do laundry, and they always started with towels, because it mattered less with towels if you got a red one in with the others. One day she heard an awful sound and went down to the laundry room to investigate. The high capacity washer was stuffed with towels, and had become unbalanced. She says if you consistently wash fourteen towels in a machine that is designed to hold ten you will eventually break your machine. She then took that as a metaphor for her own life. She says, "I am a fourteen-towel woman in a ten-towel capacity life. No wonder I feel so out of balance! I have lots to do and all of it is good and worthwhile and important, but I simply can't do it all at once. How can I balance everything? This became the object of a serious quest for me." She tried a few things: Time management, which was fine when every day worked out, but most didn't. Finding her answer in the scriptures: didn't find much about balance there. Then one day she was watching the movie The Ten Commandments and found the answer she'd been looking for... and ultimately the answer I've been looking for. She says,"There is a scene where Pharoah is mad because Moses doesn't come to his birthday party and Ramses decides to try and get his rival in trouble by charioting down personally with Pharoah so they can see firsthand what is going on. Moses is overseeing the building of a city, and his work site overlooks this immense valley filled with thousands of Hebrew slaves. On the table is one of those scales with two sides and Ramses begins to use the scale as a tool to illustrate the gravity of his accusations against Moses. He feeds the slaves with temple grain, Ramses says plinking down a little weight on one side of the scale. He gives them one day in seven to rest, another weight, another plink, and the scale tips further to that side. It goes like this for awhile and Moses just watches. When Ramses is finished making his accusations, Moses picks up a brick from the table and says: 'A city is made of bricks, the strong make many; the weak make few; and the dead make none.'
And then he drops the brick on the other side of the scale, and all the little weights of Ramses accusations go flying. There is no way they can compete. Emily Watts continues, "In that moment it came to me in a flash- I don't want balance. What I want is the brick! I want to find the one thing in my life that, if I get that right, it doesn't matter what the world throws onto the other side of the scale. It won't make any difference at all. The love of God, the love of Christ- their love for us, and our love for them- that love is the brick, and when the brick is in place, everything else works out all right."
I have been struggling, trying to do so much, trying to do nothing... this never ending quest for something so elusive that I can't figure out how to get it. And right here in my hand is this tiny little book with the answer so clear to me. I need to find and feel God's love. I need to realize that the mercy of Jesus Christ is real and that it is for me. I need to stop trying so hard to get where I want that I get nowhere. I just need to wake up every morning and try all day to choose the right, and then before I go to bed I need to evaluate where I am and pledge to do better tomorrow. I need to pray and read the scriptures and fast and let the love of God work in my life. I just need to "desire to believe and let the desire work in me". I need to feel love, not guilt. I need to do everything I can to "be the kind of person that I know I'd like to be".
My life is full of 30 second conversion moments. Things that I commit to and then I turn around and forget them. I think I'm going to start using this blog as an outlet for those. I'm going to write them down and depend on my faithful reader to keep me going. I'm going to do my best to feel God's love and do the things that I am inspired to do. I'm going to buy a brick and keep it in an obvious place in my house to remind me that all I need is the brick. And then I'm going to believe.
