The Unbalanced Life

00:00 - James Spencer (Host) So to love God with all of our heart means orienting our entire life in and around Him. That means that as the heart is changed, as it orients itself toward God, we are exercising every thought, all of our decision-making. We're exercising that with the loyalty that we have for God in mind. 00:19 - Speaker 2 (None) Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, phd, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world. 00:52 - James Spencer (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of PREPPED. I'm Dr James Spencer, and today we're going to be tackling a topic that I think is really important. It's this idea that balance is a myth. So we're going to be talking about the myth of balance. We've all heard phrases like work-life balance or finding your center, and I think the idea of balance has become a sort of cultural touch point that guides a lot of our activities. 01:19 I can remember, you know, early on in my theological studies, talking to people about the way my wife and I were sort of managing our home, and my wife has a career of her own, and one of the things that people were really concerned about was how she was going to balance her work with her family life. Now, they were also concerned with that for me, but it seemed to be less so than with my wife. And so ever since we were younger in our marriage, my wife and I have always talked about sort of this idea that balance is a myth, that really what you're doing is something quite different than balancing, and we've been trying to. You know, throughout our marriage we've been talking about how do we go about figuring this out, figuring this out, how do we think about life in a way that is not just conditioned or shaped by our surrounding culture, but really is deeply rooted in scripture, and I would argue that balance is not biblical. So today, what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at the myth of balance really through the lens of Deuteronomy 6, 4, and 5. And that's also known as the Shema, and it reads Hero Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. Now I'll offer a little bit different take on the Shema. And really the Shema is Deuteronomy 6.4. Deuteronomy 6.5 is obviously the verse that follows that. And so these categories of heart, soul and might in Deuteronomy 6.5 is something that we need to think about, and you may have noticed that I translated Deuteronomy 6.4 as the Lord is our God, the Lord alone, as opposed to the Lord is one. There are a lot of different interpretations of that. There's different ways to understand the Hebrew. 03:08 My sense is that when we're reading this, what the Israelites are really confessing is that God is their God alone. He doesn't share any of the devotion of the Israelites. The Israelites aren't sort of splitting their time between the Lord and some other God. That God is the one that they are going to be loyal to, and so I think that'll be crucial as we go forward. But this text, this Deuteronomy 6, 4, and 5, really does seem central to the life of God's people. It certainly was central to the life of God's people in Israel. God's people certainly was central to the life of God's people in Israel. But it's also central to us today because I think it does call us to a radically unbalanced life, and we're going to unpack what that means, why balance is a myth and how this passage can reshape the way we think about practices and priorities and attention and devotion. 04:04 So let's start with the idea of balance itself. I want you to just take a minute and imagine that your life is a pie chart, you know, and there are various slices for work and family and recreation or friendship, and you know, of course, god. And so the myth of balance tells us that we need to allocate these slices just right. We're trying to figure out how do we go about balancing, giving each one of these categories a sufficient degree of attention, and so, if you think about that pie chart for your life. How much of the pie does God actually get? If you put anything other than 100% on the pie chart, you're probably not giving God enough. God doesn't call us to give him the lion's share of our lives. He calls us to give us the whole of our lives. And so there is no balance here. There's no way for us to fit anything else in that pie chart, that picture right of even if you drew the line, so it's like 99.9% of the pie goes to God and there's this 0.1% left where other things happen. That's not quite right, and so this picture that we have sometimes of balance and prioritization is really problematic, because ultimately, god does not want to have just a slice of your pie chart, no matter how big it is. He doesn't even want the biggest slice, he wants the whole pie, and I think the Shema makes that clear. 05:30 Loving God with all of our heart, soul and might doesn't really leave room for any compartmentalizing of our devotion. It's not about fitting God into our schedule, it's about letting him define our entire lives. So where does that myth of balance come from? I think, at its core, balance reflects this set of cultural values. You know we're trying to be productive, but we're also trying to have a, you know, a solid family life. We're trying to have good personal fulfillment and we're trying to enjoy life, have some leisure, personal fulfillment, and we're trying to enjoy life, have some leisure, have some fun, and none of those are bad things. But I think when we try to balance them we're essentially saying I need to make everything fit on my terms, and that mindset runs counter to the biblical vision of total devotion, complete loyalty to God. 06:23 So how should we understand some of these terms in the Shema? How do we understand Deuteronomy 6, 4, and 5 as a call to unbalanced living? I think first we have to understand heart. So in Hebrew remember this is Deuteronomy 6, 5, love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. And let me start just before I jump into the heart. I forgot I should start with love. 06:44 So I think we have a slight misunderstanding of love. Love, really, in this context particularly, but I would argue at other points in the Bible. It doesn't speak to sort of, it doesn't preclude things like, you know, romantic love or the love that one might have between friends, love as an affinity toward someone or something, love as a sense of enjoyment and really liking a person in some way. It doesn't deny that it's not unemotional, this sort of love. It involves our emotions. But I think at its root probably the best starting point to understand love is really more about loyalty. 07:35 And so when we say that we love God with all we are and have, when we're called to love God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our might, what is that really saying? Well, it's saying that all that we are and have is to be dedicated to the Lord, that this is a full allegiance and loyalty to him, that there is nothing that's going to be held back from God. There's nothing that we are going to reserve for ourselves. There's no remainder left over. Once we're loyal to God with all we are and have, there is no remainder. It's an unqualified loyalty. It's not. I'll be loyal up to this point and no further. That's not the sort of love or loyalty that this passage really is pushing us toward. Instead, this passage is pushing us toward a complete and total loyalty where all we are and have is given over in our allegiance to God. It's all given to him for his use, okay. So when we think about this. Now we can examine heart In a Hebrew context. 08:42 The heart wasn't really just emotions. You know, we often think of the heart as emotional. We see it on Valentine's Day, you know. We have, you know, heart tattoos and different things like that where we would put the person we love or whatever and so we often think about the heart as sort of the seat of emotions, and we think of our mind then as the center of thought, and these two things are generally sort of tugging on each other. Right, we have our heart, which wants to do, you know sort of what it wants, and it has these emotional yearnings. It's almost irrational sometimes, but the mind is sort of the rational center for will and decision-making. Well, in Hebrew, thought, the heart was that center of thought, will and decision-making. And so as the heart goes, so the rest of your body follows. And so to love God with all of our heart means orienting our entire life in and around him. And that means that as the heart is changed, as it orients itself toward God, we are exercising every thought, our entire will, all of our decision-making. We're exercising that with the loyalty that we have for God in mind. This is now shaping and guiding all of our decisions. This decision to give our heart fully over to the Lord is a shaping of thought, will and decision-making as well as, I would argue, an emotional affection. 10:10 John Edwards, one of the early American preachers, really does talk about the affections. Not the effections, but the affections, the way that we devote ourselves to something, that we have these affinities for something, and so what often we think of when we think about this. We think about our thoughts are going to shape toward. What does it mean to be loyal to God in this moment? How do I see the world in a way that expresses my allegiance to God? Our will is surrendered to God. Our will says I want to do what God would have me to do, and the decision-making is in any given moment. We're trying to figure out what is it exactly that God wants me to do? What does it look like to live faithfully and under the authority of God in this moment? But it also is how do I cultivate this desire, this love, this emotional tie, so that I'm not doing this out of obligation but I'm actually doing it because I love the Lord? And so the heart is all of those things in Hebrew thought, all your whole heart. 11:22 What it's really saying is that aspect of you that decides things, that moves in a particular direction, that orients toward a purpose that is to be given over to God and it's to be exercised in allegiance to God, so that every decision, whether it's career related or as mundane as what to eat for dinner, should really flow from a desire to glorify God. So if we think about the Israelites hearing this command, they were really surrounded by cultures with competing gods and practices, and loving God with all their heart meant rejecting those other claims, entirely rejecting some of the aspects of those worldviews, and really honing in and saying if I am completely loyal to God, his instruction now becomes extremely important in changing the way that I think, changing the way I make choices, changing the way I exercise my will. Now soul is the next aspect. You know we're to love our God with whole heart and with all of our soul, and that's usually the way we read that. 12:27 But the actual Hebrew word underlying that's usually translated soul is the Hebrew word nephesh, and that refers to the whole person body, mind and spirit. So loving God with all your soul isn't that sort of picture of you know, the semi-transparent ghoul that comes out of us in the cartoons or, you know, you might think about the Doctor Strange movies where he sort of, you know, teleports or transfers himself into, you know, a spirit realm and he's kind of this semi-transparent version of himself that's floating around and his body is laying there, you know, on the ground, waiting for his soul basically to come back into him. That's not what the soul was in Hebrew. That's not what nephesh really refers to. Nephesh refers to our entire being, everything we are. It's not just that sort of immaterial part of us, it's also the material aspects of us. And so sometimes in the Old Testament you see, nephesh referred to something like a corpse, and so ordinarily the way we think about this is that the nephesh, the soul, would depart the corpse. Right? This is part of the reason why the corpse is no longer animated is because it doesn't have a spirit or a soul in it. Corpse is no longer animated is because it doesn't have a spirit or a soul in it, and so there's something immaterial that has left that material body, that is no longer animating it, it's no longer giving it its life, and there's something true about that. But normally when we look at nephesh, we have to understand it in a more holistic fashion. And so we want the soul and the body sort of together, the material and the immaterial aspects of who we are. They remain together. 14:08 And this passage is not just calling us to have sort of a you know, to give ourselves spiritually over to the Lord. It's saying everything your whole person, your whole being, it gives, is given over to the Lord. So this isn't just a you know, a you know. Hey, let me go worship on Sundays and really, really give God, you know, that spiritual part of me. It's in every breath you take sort of commitment. 14:33 Now the last word in this, in this stream of words, is might. So we have the heart, we have the soul. Now we have the might. And this word is often translated as strength. It probably the way I like to think of it is it means muchness. So if we look at Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, and we get toward the end, god has created the whole thing and he looks back on his creation and he says it is very good. This word for might is actually the very in very good. So it's normally used as sort of a strengthener and it's a word about extent, and so I like the idea of this is our muchness, this is our oomph, this is about everything that we can muster being given over to God, and so it does mean that we're looking at our physical capacities right. It's our strength and we could think of it. You know, not quite like this, but you know it involves how much we could bench press or how much we could deadlift, like our own physical capacity is part of this. But we shouldn't just think of our physical capacity as limited to our own body. 15:42 Especially in the ancient Near Eastern context, what this would have referred to is everything that you had authority over, every resource that you could muster, was to go toward God, and so this was about aligning your entire household, everything that you had charge over, so that it reflects your allegiance to God. So when you put these three things together, you can kind of see a vision of a life that's radically unbalanced. It's not that these other areas of life you know, like the life of the mind, the, you know the care of our bodies, or the, let's say, the work and the aspects of life where we have some charge over our household, our careers, our, what have you. It's not that these things become completely unimportant. It's that they are all seeded under, nested within, our devotion for God. And so these, our devotion for God, now shapes what we're doing in these various aspects of life. And so we have to recognize that this allegiance for God changes the way we think about everything. It changes the way we see these different areas and it changes the way we operate within those different areas. That is part of what it means to give ourselves over in allegiance to God. That is part of what it means to give ourselves over in allegiance to God. 17:03 So how does all that relate to the myths of balance, and, I would argue, the myths of balance and prioritization? I think for one that you know, the myth of balance leads us to another type of myth, and that is prioritization. But that idea, this idea that we can rank our commitments you know God first, family second, work third, and then go about our lives accordingly I just don't think it actually works. There's no point where, if you picture a priority list, just like I asked you to picture the pie chart, let's now picture a priority list. If you have God first on your priority list, at what point do you stop making God the priority and move to point number two you don't. That's not actually what it is. 17:48 The analogy works as far as it goes, right, and I realize that picture is sort of a word analogy. It's just an image of what we're doing, but the reality is that that's not how it works. We need a better picture. You know, I think our devotion to God is more like going swimming. Right, once you jump in the water, like, let's say, you go underneath the water and your head's completely submerged maybe scuba diving is a better analogy there's no part of you that's not in the water, right, the whole thing, like you're just wet, there's no way to avoid it, and so I think that's more what we need to be picturing. It's not a priority list where we've got God first and then we can move to family and then we can move to whatever it's. We've immersed ourselves in God, and now we are in a completely new context, and that new context of complete and total devotion to God changes the way that we interact with the world in a very similar way that we would change the way we interact underneath the water. We do things differently underneath the water than we do on land, and so that's more the picture that I see. 18:58 So this idea that we can prioritize things can be helpful in a more limited sense, but I would argue that it creates a false sense of control. It assumes that we are capable of rightly dividing our lives into neat categories, each with its own time and place. But I think the Shema doesn't really leave room for that kind of thinking. It demands that everything that we do, every relationship, every interest, every work-related move you know, all aspects of our life be nested within our devotion to God. God is really asking us here to get wet, to go under the water with him, and once we're under the water we have to do things differently. 19:41 The other analogy that I really like to use is a Russian nesting doll. The largest doll is going to represent, in this case, our love for God. It's that unqualified loyalty that now shapes everything else. And so if you think about a Russian nesting doll, the largest doll has a certain shape to it, and then you open it up and there are smaller dolls that have that same shape. They may be designed a little differently, they may have different decorations, or what have you. Oftentimes they're completely identical. They're just a little smaller. But I think that's an interesting picture for how we should think about our love for God. Our love for God shapes everything within it, and so these smaller dolls are actually designed to fit within the bigger doll, and the bigger doll and the smaller dolls have the same shape. You don't open those Russian nesting dolls up and find you know, just, you know little balls, or you know tiny little blocks or something like that. That's not how they work. The Russian nesting dolls are designed to have the same shape so that when you're opening them up, you're just seeing that same shape over and over and over again. 20:45 And I think the picture is helpful, because when we have this devotion to God, when we're totally focused on this unqualified loyalty to the Lord, it's going to shape the other things that we do in particular ways, and they're going to start looking more like we have a total devotion to God than less, like we have a total devotion to God. This is going to start looking more like we have a total devotion to God than less like we have a total devotion to God. This is going to start looking like we're not prioritizing these things, we're not trying to balance something, but that we are allowing our devotion to God to bleed into all the rest of our life and to shape the way we look and think about everything that's going on. So I would argue that balance fails because we just have a limited capacity. We are finite beings. We're limited in time and energy and attention. We're creations. We've been created, and so I think there's a sense in which, even if we could weigh every aspect of our life and make it all fit together, that we would still be missing this idea that we're created beings. Our finiteness actually creates the context in which balance is ultimately going to fail, because we're not ordered to the world alone. 22:04 We certainly have relationships with the world. We see this in Genesis 1, 26 and 27. God sort of defines what humanity's relationship to the world is supposed to be. We're supposed to multiply and be fruitful, fill the world and subdue it. We're supposed to have dominion over creation. This is the relationship that's established, but that's not a one-to-one relationship. In other words, that's not just us deciding what it means to have dominion over the world. That's not just us deciding what it looks like to subdue the world. This is us in relation to God, sitting under his authority, exercising his authority in creation. It's a delegated authority and, as such, it is a shaped authority. There's certain things, like you know, god lets Adam name the animals. He doesn't, you know, micromanage that process. We might say Adam has named the animals he's trying to recognize. Is there an animal here that would correspond to me, that would be an appropriate helper for me? And so there's an autonomy that comes as we learn to exercise this authority under God, this delegated authority that we have. But it's still a delegated authority and such, it's not one that we determine. I think there's also this sense, and this is the second thing we do we misplace that authority. 23:26 I think when we're striving for balance, we often end up putting ourselves in the position of ultimate authority. We are deciding what gets priority rather than just allowing God to direct our lives. And we see this play out in Scripture at different points. You know Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, right, he's at this point where he doesn't want to go to the cross, he doesn't want to suffer, he's concerned about, he's praying to God about it. He says, not my will, but your will be done. There's a moment there, not that I think Jesus was tempted by this, but there's a moment there where we could picture ourselves in that moment and say, yeah, I think I have other priorities right now. I'm going to shift away from this, and that's a. That's a taking away of authority from God, deciding that we know better than he does, because we don't want to go through the discomfort that he has put into our lives. And the reality is that balance often leans into that. You know, oh, I've been working so hard, I think I need a break. Well, that can be appropriate, or it can be completely inappropriate. It can be you know us just getting lazy and you know trying to manage our energy, but the reality is that if we're unqualified in our devotion to the Lord, he can guide us into those moments of work and rest better than we even know how to. I think it also suggests that this idea that balance doesn't work, because there's also a sense of fragmentation. Balance really encourages us to compartmentalize our lives, and so we treat some aspects of our lives as spiritual, some aspects of our lives as physical, some aspects of our lives as mundane, some aspects of our lives as really important. But I think the Bible really calls us to an integrated life where every part of our life reflects our devotion to God. 25:19 I love going to Leviticus 19. That passage begins with be holy as I am holy, and he's calling Israel to, you know, imitate his own holiness. And then he goes through a variety of different laws, some of which relate to what we might consider to be mundane issues related to agriculture or the treatment of animals. It talks about justice. It talks about that's where, or the treatment of animals. It talks about justice. It talks about that's where the phrase love your neighbor as yourself actually occurs the first time. And so you get this whole range of activities in Leviticus 19, and you just sit back and you say, wow, exhibiting God's holiness, imitating God's holiness. There is no end to it. There's no aspect of our lives where we can't imitate God's holiness. In this we just have to figure out how. And so there's a sense in which it's an all-encompassing activity. 26:13 And then, finally, I'd say the reason that balance ultimately tends to fail is that there's a lot of cultural pressure. You know, the world's definition of balance often conflicts with God. And so if culture says follow your heart, the scripture says love the Lord, your God, with all your heart. If culture says, do what makes you happy, scripture says deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. And so, to the extent that we are, you know, bowing to cultural pressure, as allowing as opposed to allowing that unqualified loyalty to shape how we think about the world, shape how we think about what we're doing in the world, it's going to fail. 26:51 Now, my tendency is to think that there are three aspects to this unbalanced living, and I think they're very intertwined. I'll introduce them here and then I'm gonna have three separate podcasts on each one of them where you'll kind of begin to see how they overlap and the way they're intertwined. But the first one of these is, you know, reordering our loves. I think we have to have rightly ordered loves, we have to move away from balance and I think that we have to move toward unbalanced living. And the first step to that is recognizing that our loves may be disordered. 27:21 Augustine talks about this a lot. He talks about sin in terms of misdirected desire or disordered loves. You know, we take good things, like family or work or justice, and we love them more than we love God. In other words, we're more loyal to them than we are to God. They become the thing that we are ordering our lives toward, we're orienting toward them. Our posture changes so that our family becomes the most important thing in our life as opposed to God. So we can see this in a number of different ways, but essentially, as we get into this idea of reordering loves, the whole notion is that if God is calling us to love him, to express our devotion to him as alone God, that means everything in our lives then are ordered to him. There's an orientation that has to take place where we sit back and say, well, I have an unqualified loyalty to God. These areas of life need to look different. 28:21 Anything else that's put on top. If we say I'm gonna order my life toward my career, that's going to change the shape of the rest of our lives, and so this ordering really matters. It's not just a rank order, right it's. It's an order that is more like uh, you know, I hate to say it like this it's kind of like packing a suitcase for a trip and there's only a certain way, that certain way that all of this stuff is going to fit. And so you know, depending on what you're packing, you have to sort of think through where am I going to put for me, where am I going to put my suit so it gets the least wrinkled it possibly? Can you know, am I going to pack my toothpaste right on top of my only suit jacket? Does that seem like a wise decision? No, it doesn't. And so there's an order that we use when we're packing a suitcase right, everything has its place because we're trying to achieve something on the other end of the trip to make the other end of the trip easier, right? And I think that's what reordering loves really is. It isn't just that rank order one, two, three, four, five. It's a designed, a reordering of the chaos of our lives, an arrangement of things together in relation to one another, such that our loyalty to God ultimately causes the rest of our lives to conform in a very particular way. So, again, we'll get into reordering gloves in a separate podcast, but I just want to introduce that concept here. 29:54 The second step in, I think you know, sort of moving toward an unbalanced life is reorienting our attention. Attention, in my view, is theologically and profoundly theological. What we focus on shapes who we become, and, in the Bible, paying attention to God really does involve obedience. It's not just about being aware of him, it's about aligning our actions with his will. When we pay attention to God, we're not just going oh yeah, he's there Right. In the same way, if you're driving down the highway and you see brake lights in front of you, you don't just register in your head oh, brake lights, you hit your brake too, you swerve into another lane, you do something to avoid slamming into the back of the car behind you, and so that act of responding to it requires a certain sort of attention. It's not just a noticing, it's a real thoughtful attention, a recognition that this thing that we're about to do has relevance for us. 30:57 So I think about Exodus 9, 20, and 21. And in this point, you know, god has told the people of Egypt that there's going to be this hailstorm. And there are two groups that are sort of contrasted in 9, 20, and 21, where there's a group who fears the word of the Lord, and this fearing the word of the Lord can be roughly sort of equated to attention, or can be assumed to involve attention at the very least. So when they're fearing the word of the Lord, god has said they're gonna send a hailstorm, and they're like we should probably listen, I'm gonna pay attention to that and they bring their livestock indoors and their servants indoors before the hailstorm. There's this other group that ignores the warning. They pay no attention to it in the sense not that, oh, we didn't hear that message. Sorry, god, we would have brought our servants and our livestock in if we'd known. It's more like they hear it and they go not relevant, no need to pay attention to that. My livestock and my servants are staying out there in the fields and so when the hailstorm comes they suffer greater losses. 32:02 And attention here is really the difference between life and death. That's what we're looking at in Exodus 9, 20 and 21. But I think it's a great illustration of what paying attention to the Lord actually means. It is like, again, that car analogy I think is actually helpful, because when we see those brake lights in front of us and we're speeding down the highway, you don't just register them and go oh, brake lights. You start to do something, you recognize those as relevant to the situation you're in and you begin to respond to those. So attention involves this idea of recognizing that God is infinitely more relevant than any other actor or factor in any given situation. So in our lives, reorienting attention might mean, you know, stepping back from any distractions like social media, endless to-do lists creating and it really is about creating space to attend to God's presence, and again, in the next couple of podcasts I'll address that a little bit more deeply. 33:00 I think the third piece in developing an unbalanced life really is about responding to God in every situation. And I mentioned response, and you could kind of see already how attention and response aren't exactly separable categories. They sort of bleed into each other. And so I think that responding to God requires discernment. It requires that we recognize that God's wisdom often challenges our assumptions, and the passage I really like to use to illustrate this is 1 Samuel 24. 33:29 David's hiding out in a cave from Saul. Saul comes in to relieve himself. David's men think that this is God giving Saul into David's hand and encouraged David to kill the king. David instead cuts a corner off his garment garment and he even feels bad about that. And so what David is doing in this moment is not just taking advantage of the situation. He's not reading the situation as if oh okay, I know exactly what's happening here. He is now responding to God in that moment, recognizing that if he kills Saul, it's going to appear, at least to some, that if he kills Saul, it's going to appear, at least to some, that David took advantage of a situation, that this is not God putting David on the throne, that David got there by killing Saul, and that's not what David wants. David wants to make sure that he's responding to God. He's going to trust God to put him on the throne in a way that maximizes the glory that goes to the Lord, and that's what David's looking for. And so his response to God in that moment, as opposed to responding to the situation in that moment, yields this odd incident, but it really is a picture of how David ends up being loyal to the Lord. 34:40 So I want to give some practical steps as we wrap up here. Number one I just encourage you rethink some of your categories, rethink what it means to have a balanced life. I would encourage you to think of it as an unbalanced life and as you do that, I think you're going to ask yourself are my loves in the right place? What's driving my decision-making? Are there really areas where my love for God is overshadowed by other commitments? I'd encourage you to establish a cadence of life, create rhythms in your life that are prioritizing tending to God, and that might mean daily prayer, weekly Sabbath rest or even intentional moments of reflection. 35:19 In the last episode, we talked about spiritual disciplines, and I think these spiritual disciplines do play into this. They carve out that time where we can really attend to God's presence in our lives. I think we've also got to resist some false musts. There are a lot of cultural pressures that tend to demand our attention but don't really align with God's purposes, and we need to realize that the consequences of not doing what the culture wants us to do is often much lighter than we think it may be. And even if it's not and we could channel Paul here you know those any negative consequences that we experience from not doing what the culture wants are going to be fairly light and momentary and compared to the glory that's waiting for us in heaven. 36:02 And then, finally, I would say we need to learn to delight in obedience. And the way we learn to delight in obedience is we just need to learn to find joy in following God's commands. You know, psalm 1-2 says his delight is in the law of the Lord. The blessed one has this delight in the law of the Lord. That's about obedience, it's about taking pleasure and following the instructions of God. 36:22 Now we're returned to those practical comments multiple times over the next few episodes because, even though it's a little repetitive. I actually think there's a depth to these that I wanna reinforce, and so there's no need to be novel, there's no need to be creative. I think oftentimes we aren't really accomplishing the unbalanced life we're not really moving forward spiritually, not because we're not creative enough, but just because we're not doing the basics. So, to conclude, I think you know living an unbalanced life isn't easy, but I do think it's worth it. And I think when we surrender our lives to the myth of balance and, you know, we allow ourselves to start trying to order our lives based on how we feel or what we think, we're not able to embrace a total devotion to God. But it's in that total devotion to God that we're going to find a life of purpose and joy and peace that really transcends the chaos of our circumstances. So thanks for joining me today on PREPPED. In our next episodes we're going to explore those three things reordering love, reorienting attention and responding to God more fully. 37:31 And if today's discussion challenged you or encouraged you, I'd just love to hear your thoughts. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast or to the YouTube channel. I would encourage you to leave a positive review hopefully positive and also share this episode with someone else who might benefit from it. If you'd like to do some additional reading on the unbalanced life, I've written a couple of articles on this on usefultogod.com and you can check them out there. So I do have several articles on usefultogodcom. You can also find a lot of other resources and I just encourage you to take a look at those as you have time. So, hey, until next time. I'll catch you on the next episode of PREPPED, but let's commit to living an unbalanced life for the glory of God. Take care everybody. 38:15 - Speaker 2 (None) Thanks for tuning in to PREPPED. If today's episode helped you view the world through a God-centered lens, be sure to hit subscribe so you're always prepared for what comes next. Don't forget to rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more believers eager to live out God's story. Share this episode with a friend, family member or loved one, and together let's keep challenging the world's narratives. Until next time, stay grounded, stay inspired and continue living out God's plan. See you soon on our next episode of PREPPED.