on balancing

There are so many things that compete for our attention. How do you balance all the things in your life? I have school, chores, social functions, church...so many things that inevitably take my time and attention away from other things. 

 I am a very visually minded person, and this analogy has really stuck with me. 

You're making an elaborate dinner and on a four burner stove you have a pan of asparagus, a pot of fish sauce, a fish filet in a skillet, a pot of noodles boiling, and a saucepan of balsamic reduction all on the stove at one time. As you can imagine things are overcrowded-in fact one of the pots can't even fit on the stove. Things are brushing up against one another, things are wedged in tightly, but one pot doesn't have a burner at all. There's no way that a four burner stove can fit five dishes that need heat. You're going to have to comprise on what's going to go on the stove or put it to the side for later. 

Of course, you're the stove in this analogy and the pots and pans crowding for space are the things that crowd for space in your life. This can be family and friends, your time with God,  school, work, sports, activities, etc. The heat from the burners are the energy you have to take care of all the different things. If you have too much on the stove then you can't properly heat everything because there's not enough energy to go around. Plus, with all the Tetris-ing you have to do to fit five dishes on together, none of the things are going to be centered over the burners, so they won't warm through evenly. 

You have to make a conscious decision on what might have to wait for later or make a compromise. Of course there's fundamentals that need your energy: God, your family, school...but then there are things that definitely just clutter up the stove: social media, shopping, sports...things like that. 

You can't fit everything so you have to choose what's most important. Like Jon Acuff says in his book Finish, "In order for me to go all in on things that matter, I have to choose to suck at a few that don't." 

I know that this analogy was a bit of a cluttered jumble of words, so I apologize. But I hope that it helped!