20170531 – Life is like a bell curve

Recently, I was chatting with a friend about how difficult it is to get the right balance between “Spiritual” life and our daily, “Worldly” life, and this balance doesn’t get easier as the years pass. My friend is 20 years younger than me and we soon found that our priorities are, by necessity, very different.

My friend has teenage boys to parent and so the “financial” aspect of her life requires a. large input of $$. This makes life difficult and the choices hard to make. Not only that, but because of problems of a financial nature that occurred in the early years of her marriage, she finds it necessary to use her talents to earn extra income.

The words of Ecclesiastes come to mind. There is a “time for all things under the sun,” and if you miss the natural time for that thing which is “under the sun” then it is really hard if you have to do that thing at the “wrong” time. I thought about the various stages of life and realised that the balance changes with every period of our life.

So what does one’s life look like? To me Life looks like a bell curve. You come into this world with nothing, and you go out with nothing. In between, there is a great need for “acquisition” but once we have passed the “halfway” mark, there is an increasing need to divest ourselves of those very acquisitions we have spent so much time and money in acquiring. It is all so completely pointless! But that is life.

I think what IS necessary is to get the balance right. It is a balancing act between God/Mammon over energy. At the end of one’s life, it is all about how we spent our time.