spiritual director looked him square in the eye and said, “The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”

“You are so tired,” continued the director, “because a good half of what you are doing has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life.  You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers.”

In a hyperconnected, hyperdistracted world, the move toward balance is often just an attempt to answer the question that only wholeheartedness can actually resolve.  “Half here” cannot bring balance to the half that is “not here.”

Where is “a good half of you” missing that needs something to which you can give your “full powers” with laser-like focus and whole-hearted commitment?

“Balance” is Overrated « THE CHURCH OF FACEBOOK: The Book, the Blog, and the Man Behind Both

Yes, Jessie!   This is key.  “Balance” becomes the ultimate compromise.  Radical presence,  radical obedience,  is often used as one side of the scale,  and “reality” or “the way it is” is on the other.  But is this OBEDIENCE?   This is our lame excuse for “struggling with it”.  What we are saying at the root is that we don’t intend to follow the radical path to which we are called.  we have to “balance” it.

“Half here” suggests tome,  that in our enthusiasm to adopt technology we work under this false reprioritization.  We can “live with” whatever damaging effects a technology or usage of technology may cause,  under the “balancing act” that sees relevance and “effectiveness” as the opposite weight on the scales.  I’m back to the issue of worship and what we say about it when we put it online as I have seen it done.  There’s no question that many of these examples have “good production value”.  Is that what makes it worship?  ISTM that there is a hugely important ingredient to worship,  which is attentiveness;  to God, to one another,  to our own “noise” which we bring to the table. 

Again,  this is not any kind of encouragment to ignore social media.  There are certainly social elements crucial to worship.  And there are always “media”.  But what expectation does the media or medium bring with it.  What assumptions?  And in paying attention to the “twittersphere”,  do we also allow our attention to be subdivided?  So,  far from being a call to turn our backs on social media in worship,  this is a call to discernment about what worship is or becomes with any particular usage of certain tools or toolsets and the assumptions they bring with their usage.