Counterbalance

By Jeremy Yancey

Tension is tough. We don’t like it. We try to avoid it. Like the strain in a relationship, a delicate situation at work or Uncle Jack at the reunion. No one automatically puts tension in the win column. But would you believe me if I told you tension can be a good thing?

Consider the beautiful sound generated by an expert guitarist. The strings are stretched taut. Each one has its level of tension. The guitarist’s fingers work their way across the strings, adding tension here and there, making the instrument sing.

In a physical way, we rely on various tensions throughout our lives. We can think of the human body as a complex system of pulleys, belts and gears. Without healthy tension, your body would collapse to the floor. Tension keeps it moving in the right way.

Emotional, mental and spiritual tension can also serve to make us stronger. These tensions are not pleasant. We often try to avoid them. But we ultimately recognize the growth that results.

When it comes to living a life for Christ, there is such a thing as healthy tension. Instead of viewing tension through a negative lens, I want us to embrace tension as a positive force, creating a counterbalance that brings fullness to our lives.

COUNTERBALANCE IN THE BIBLE

Once we understand the principle of healthy tension, we start seeing it throughout Scripture.

In Matthew 10:16, Jesus sent His disciples out in ministry, challenging them to “be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” Consider the tension involved in that pairing. A snake strikes quickly. It’s fierce, agile. A dove is calm, peaceful, pure. The Bible says we’re supposed to be some of both. A life “to the full” (see John 10:10) balances between healthy tensions.

We see Jesus described as both a lamb and a lion (see John 1:28 and Revelation 5:5) and approachable yet unbelievably powerful. The king—and an animal to be sacrificed.

In James 1:19, we’re told that “everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.” Quick and slow. Listen actively. Energetically understand. But frame your responses carefully. Don’t fly off the handle.

We find balancing acts like this in most books of the Bible. We are cautioned against extremes that are sinful or dangerous, but we’re invited to live, with God’s guidance, in the tension between two acceptable states.

How does this work? Are we constantly bouncing back and forth, like those who are “double-minded and unstable in all they do” (James 1:8)? No, I think there’s a big difference between vacillating and oscillating.

When I vacillate, I’m like a bullet ricocheting, engaging in disorganized and dangerous movement without any purpose. But when I oscillate, I move with purpose between two points. Like the wide swath covered by the spotlight of a light tower. Back and forth it goes, covering a range of territory. It’s not fixed on one spot but illuminates a wide area. When we show that same range in our attitudes and actions, we display maturity.

I think of the apostle Paul saying, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). He wasn’t masquerading as someone he was not. He was oscillating. And we see this as we track his ministry in the book of Acts. He could speak powerfully as a rabbi in a synagogue or quietly as a philosopher in Athens. He adopted different personal styles in his strategic efforts to get the gospel across.

EVERYDAY LIFE

If tension is truly a normal part of life, it will be an ingredient in the Christ-centered life. Let’s pause here a moment and see what Paul says in Romans 12:1: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (MSG).

What kind of life do these verses describe? Is this some extreme of religious devotion? No! It’s “ordinary, everyday life” that’s offered up to God. The Greek text uses a normal word for our physical bodies (somata) and a normal word for living (zosan) to encompass all these ordinary activities—sleeping, eating, etc. This is the life we give back to God—lived within our normal tensions but letting God establish our healthy balance. If we live and move and have our being in Him, He will fill our lives.

That’s what I want for my kids and my wife and for me. I want us to learn the code for counterbalance. I want us to practice the rhythm of oscillation within several everyday practical and emotional tensions rather than just fitting into the wildly vacillating extremes of culture that derail us from pivotal friendships, damage our communities, and deprive us of our potential influence.

Is it challenging? Uh, heck, yes. And we will explore how to navigate those challenges in each chapter. But this ongoing, ever-changing, consistently inconsistent pull between two extremes has the capacity to produce a full and vibrant life in Christ that changes how we look at the world—and can also, in fact, change the world.

GOING TO EXTREMES

“Extremes” are the enemy of healthy tension. These days, you don’t have to search long on FaceTube or Tik-chat to find people talking about extreme things in extreme ways. That seems to be the culture we’re living in, doesn’t it? We are quick to jump to extreme conclusions, extreme opinions, extreme solutions and extreme emotions.

It’s almost like we’re addicted to it. We have a tension deficit. We lack healthy tension.

When Jesus offered us life “to the full” in John 10:10, He wasn’t pushing us to these extremes of judgment, anger, shaming or verbal abuse. He called us to love God with all we’ve got and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Also, to love our enemies. These might be considered extreme challenges in their own way, but they’re grounded in a vital relationship with God—a God who created us to exist within healthy tensions. “In him we live and move and have our being,” Acts 17:28 says.

God wants you to have an incredibly full life, like a bouquet of flowers whose vibrant colors can be enjoyed from all sides. Extreme thinking dismisses any other angle. We don’t hear the healthy tension from the taut strings of a well-tuned guitar—but only the raucous shouts insulting those who disagree.

HEALTHY TENSION

Weddings can be lovely events, with beautiful gowns and tuxes donned, majestic music played, meaningful words proclaimed and everyone on his or her best-ish behavior. But then there’s the character we’ve come to know as Bridezilla. She breathes fire, destroying people in her path, because she craves the perfect wedding.

So, we could set up a grid. At one extreme is Bridezilla whose perfectionism creates terror. At the other extreme is Apathy, whose utter lack of planning creates a bad experience for everyone. But there are options in the middle—not a single midpoint, but two—what we might call Careful Planner and Relaxed Planner.

Careful Planner pays attention to details, communicating her desire for a great wedding to everyone involved. But no fire-breathing. Relaxed Planner understands that the event won’t be perfect but still wants to create a good experience for her guests and for posterity.

A healthy tension exists between those two central poles. Both are healthy positions, but they often improve by moving toward the other pole and away from the extreme. The groom tells his Careful Planner bride-to-be, “Relax! It’ll be fine.” The mother of the Relaxed Planner bride says, “Maybe we should serve appetizers while people wait for the photos to be taken.”

In my book, Good In Tension, I point to six different sets of characteristics. In each case, there are two central qualities that are quite different from each other, but both are good. Many people in my life lean one way or the other, including me. Like the Bridezilla pattern I describe above, any of these qualities could be taken to an unhealthy extreme:

Rigid—Focused—Flexible—Spineless

Delusional—Hopeful—Realistic—Pessimistic

Arrogant—Confident—Humble—Ashamed

Critical—Candid—Kind—Flattering

Frantic—Running—Resting—Complacent

Dominating—Speaking—Listening—Withdrawing

People do a lot of damage to themselves and others when they adopt extreme positions in these areas. Perhaps the worst thing is that they deny themselves that healthy tension with the opposite characteristic.

Don’t read what I’m not saying. I’m not dictating one position as the absolute place to be. You may be careful or relaxed, but live within that tension. You may naturally be “Focused,” or you might like to do life in a more “Flexible” way. What would it look like to stay open to options from the opposite side? What if you could intentionally invite people into your life who occupy that other spot and listen to them? You might not need to change your focused ways, but there might be times when a flexible choice will work better.

Maybe you’re the “Realistic” voice in every staff meeting, explaining why some new plan probably won’t work. Great. That’s an important role. That team will also benefit from the thoughts of the “Hopeful” person across the table. The very God of the cosmos shows us the way things really are, but He also invites us to put our hope in His miraculous work. Wisdom resides in a well-balanced tension between these viewpoints.

THE CENTER OF THE STORM

If you live for Christ long enough, there will be moments when you feel you are in the palm of God’s hand. Your ear is to the chest of God, and you can hear your Creator’s heartbeat. Everything is under control.

Then there are other moments of chaos when you can’t quite see your next step. Life is volatile, constantly in motion. You feel like you’re on a boat . . . in a storm . . . on the Sea of Galilee . . . while Jesus is asleep in the stern. Remember that story? The disciples were freaking out. They woke Jesus up, yelling, “Don’t you care?” (Mark 4:38).

As you may recall, Jesus spoke peace to the storm. He does the same in our stormy situations. Life may drive us to extremes, but Jesus pulls us back to the center, to our center, to our trust in Him. That trust requires a tension of leaning on Him and leaning not on our own understanding.

Healthy tension. Jesus wants to help you find it and live in it. On our own, we’re prone to extreme reactions to the storms and chaos of life. Jesus is always inviting us back to a centered, surrendered trust in Him. He is our horizon point. The lighthouse. The fulcrum that will recalibrate our tension deficit.