CBC Worship Ministries: Devotional Blog

When I was a young boy, somewhere around nine or ten years old, I remember going to a church potluck dinner with my family. Being a nine-year-old and basically ADD, sitting around a table while adults gabbed and listened to boring speakers was enough incentive for me to find trouble. And I found it in a salt shaker. I can still remember it clearly. It was a typical clear salt shaker, the kind you find in every church’s kitchen cabinet. While the adults were ignoring me I took the top off the salt shaker and dumped a pile of salt on the white paper tablecloth in front of me. For the rest of the evening I kept licking my finger, putting it in the salt and then licking the salt off my finger. I did this the rest of the night. Well, almost the rest of the night. Because gradually I begin to feel kind of funny – and moments later - you guessed it – I puked. Yep, everything came up from soup to nuts.

Now salt is a good thing. I looked it up on the ‘net and discovered that there are at least 22 vital functions of salt in our bodies. It is critical that our bodies maintain the proper amount of salt. However, as with the case of most good things in life, too much of a good thing can destroy you. Hence the need for balance.

I find that in my life one of the greatest areas of weakness is in finding balance in the “good things”. Too much ice cream. Too much wide-screen, flat-panel, LED TV. Too much . . . well, you fill in the blank with yours! Some of the greatest problems that we encounter with balance in our lives do not revolve around things that are “bad” but things that are basically “good”! Consider the Israelites. They’re wandering around the desert and they’re hungry. Nothing worse than a hungry Israelite. So God provides. In a big way. Manna. If that stuff tasted anything like Italian bread baked fresh from the oven I would have been on overload the very first day. I bet it was very tasty indeed. But God also warned the Israelites that they were only to gather what they needed for each day. If they tried to gather too much and store it overnight, it went bad. And not just bad – it rotted and was filled with worms. Honestly, if I was an Israelite and had seen, smelled or touched some of that rotten manna, I would never even be able to look at the stuff again!

If you need balance in your life one of the first places I would suggest you look is in the “good things”. The things in which you dare to indulge. The things that entice you to excess. Because it is in those things that you will find lead you to some of the greatest difficulties in your life. Take it from this salt-eating, hyperactive, overgrown nine-year-old – too much of a good thing’ll kill ya!