Finding the Middle Ground

             Some of you know that, to keep my weight down, I try to eat a low-carb diet.  Every once in a while, though, I give myself a treat.  I did that this past week.  I stopped at Dairy Queen and had an Oreo blizzard.

            Now I know that some people around here champion Zesto ahead of Dairy Queen.  I can’t say I’ve ever been disappointed in the ice cream treats at either place.  However, we were driving through Miller, so Zesto was not an option.

            Because I don’t do this very often, and because the ice cream was so good, I wanted to eat it slowly and really savor it.  But there’s a problem with doing that, which is, simply, that it’s ice cream.  If you eat it too slowly, it will melt, and you will be left with ice cream soup.  Now, that’s still the best kind of soup there is, but when you go Dairy Queen, you don’t want ice cream soup.  You want ice cream.  

            So, the dilemma.  Eat the blizzard too quickly, and your mouth freezes and the ice cream is gone before you know it and you can’t really savor it.  Eat it too slowly, and you miss out on the very thing you wanted.  You have to try to find a middle ground, and that can be tricky sometimes.

            It struck me that life can be like that sometimes.  We know, deep down, that our lives are short, even if we don’t like to think about that very much.  And the older we get, the more we live with that knowledge that life is short.  And so, sometimes, we want to slow down and savor our lives.  But there’s a problem with doing that.  If we slow down too much, we miss out on a lot of things we’d really like to be able to do.  But on the other hand, if we live our lives too fast and try do too much, the happy moments in our lives are gone before we know it and we never really get the chance to savor them.  

            The thing to do, as with eating the Oreo blizzard, is to try to find a middle ground.  And that can be tricky.  And so what I’m going to tell you to do, again, is pray about it.  Pray for God’s Holy Spirit to show you how to live your life.  Pray for God’s Holy Spirit to help you find that middle ground, where you don’t miss out on things, but you can still savor the things you do.  

            God wants us to enjoy our lives.  God wants us to enjoy them in God’s way, following God’s rules, but God still wants us to enjoy them.  That can be harder as we get older, when we can no longer do some of the things we used to do and we’re more likely to have things that hurt than we used to be.  But God still wants us to enjoy them.  In fact, God still wants us to savor them.  So ask God to show you how to do that.  And be willing to listen for God’s answer.