Extreme Balance – Grace

This post will make more sense if you read some of the earlier extreme balance posts

We called our first daughter Hannah Grace (Hannah means grace in Hebrew), so she was Grace Grace Rubie (now Morrison). Suffice to say, I have always been in awe of Grace.

Grace is one of those words that describes something so profound and multifaceted it is hard to define. I have heard many definitions over the years, some good, some not so good.

 I thought I would make up my own definition (why not) – It is not a comprehensive definition, but I think it captures one facet of Grace:

– Unexpected Beauty –

Most of us can remember Susan Boyle stepping onto the stage during her audition for Britain’s Got Talent. She was an embarrassingly awkward, ordinary looking lady. Everyone’s expectation was a cringe-worthy performance – we sensed her vulnerability and it made us anxious.

And then she opened her mouth “I dreamed a dream in days gone by….” And we were all touched by grace – something unexpectedly beautiful.

On ANZAC day when Ataturk’s letter to the mothers of soldiers who died on the battlefields of Gallipoli, is read “… You the mothers who sent your sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace.” This expression of love, by a former enemy, is unexpectedly beautiful and touches us with grace.

I have included grace as one of the posts about extreme balance because it is often grace that we see when opposing truths are lived in the extreme.

When the King of Kings kneels and serves, it is unexpectedly beautiful – grace

When Justice is met with mercy, we see grace

When faith met works and Jesus wept, we saw grace

When life leaps forth from death we see grace

When we look at the faces of Daniel Morcombe’s parents who have dedicated their lives to saving children having tragically lost their own son to a predator – we do not see bitterness, we see grace.

The human heart is in tune with grace.

We are exalted by it.

Grace has a memory that lasts long after the event.

The most unexpectedly beautiful object in the world is the Cross.

The most horrific means of torture and death devised by man has caused more hearts to exalt and sing than any other object.

It is where truth and justice met mercy and forgiveness

It is where God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…

It is ‘Amazing Grace’ where those once lost are now found and those blind now see

The hymn When I Survey the Wonderous Cross proclaims ‘… did ere such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown’

this act of grace changed the world

and changed my world

I hope you have surrendered to its unexpected beauty

Why not show grace today and do something unexpectedly beautiful!

The Better Half Diet

Time to lighten things up – literally and figuratively – I literally need to lose some weight and that last post was a bit heavy.

If you are like me, getting on the scales has been the last thing on your mind during this period of isolation.

I thought I would share a diet I came up with 10 years ago – it’s very hard to do (I may not do it again myself) but unlike other diets, where you suddenly put weight back on after you are finished, this diet has a long shadow effect. I strictly followed it for three months in 2011 and lost a lot of weight and kept it off for about five years without trying.

It’s very simple in concept but, as I’ve said, it’s hard, messes with some ingrained moral code and can be socially awkward – you can see why I am an engineer and not a salesman.

Unfortunately, it can also make those around you fatter – some might see this as a win-win.

The amount of energy contained in food, our bodies ability to store it, and the ease with which it is consumed, far outweighs (no pun intended) the effort required to remove it.

The company accountant where I work is into cycling and he measures his energy output, for any given ride, in terms of Ferrero Rochers – a half-hour ride, is four Ferrero Rochers i.e. it’s equivalent in energy to eating about four Ferrero Rochers – which would you rather do? The key to losing weight is eating less. I’m told that exercising helps as well.

So, what is the better half diet?

Firstly, you don’t change what you eat.

Secondly, you don’t change the amount of food that you put on your plate.

You just eat half of it – the better half!

By better half I don’t mean eat the veggies and leave the meat, I mean eat half the meat, but pick the juiciest half – you might as well enjoy your suffering. I’ve found that most steaks have a good and a bad half. Also eat half of everything else on the plate – the best half.

The obvious question is – why not just serve yourself half as much?

Partly because you won’t!

But mainly because this is where the power of the diet lies.

You must break the habit of eating everything that is put in front of you!

This is where the moral dilemma lies. What about all the starving children in Africa that will be worse off if I don’t eat everything?

Most people are raised from a young age being told to eat everything because of the starving children.

I was in Ghana (Africa) in 2012, after I had been on the diet, and saw this sign in the mine mess hall – it seems that the message is both true and universal.

This is also where the social awkwardness lies.

What about the feelings of the person who prepared the meal – they will think I didn’t like it!

The waiter will ask you – was everything ok?

I found that if I told people what I was doing they understood – mostly! However, to avoid embarrassment for the host, I would sometimes just ask for a small serve because I was dieting. I would still leave something on the plate just to instill the habit.

Another downside of the diet occurs when someone else at the table is a scrap eater, they may actually put weight on because of you.

–

I’ve told you all of the downsides of the diet, here are the benefits:

You sit down to a hearty meal with lots on your plate, so you do not feel deprived.

You eat all of the good bits of the food on your plate.

You don’t have to change what you eat.

You don’t have to change where you eat.

You can still go to the same restaurants!

The habits that you learn create a long shadow effect – you keep weight off for a long time.

–

I kept weight off after the diet because …

Once I had finished the diet my appetite had decreased.

I started eating smaller portions but I still didn’t eat everything on my plate – It just felt right!

I had learnt what full felt like, so I stopped eating when I was full.

I had stopped seeing ‘eating everything’ as the goal.

–

What if it doesn’t work for you?

If you do this diet and don’t lose weight, it means that before the diet you were eating more than twice as much as you needed – you might need the ‘best quarter’ diet!

–

By the way I ate both halves of the lamington in the top photo – the shadow has passed.

Extreme Balance – Scripture and Science

(This post will make more sense if you read ‘Extreme Balance’ first)

I was shocked to see a placard, at a climate change rally, that declared ‘Science not Scripture’. I wondered, who on earth could have possibly mounted a scriptural argument against the gradual change of our climate due to greenhouse emissions. The placard was actually shouting – Christians have put forward yet another reason for me to reject their scriptures.

I have a view on climate change…

The company I worked for, for 30 years, doubled in size a few times and it was very uncomfortable requiring major restructuring and governance transformation. It is well known that growth requires change and change is uncomfortable and challenging. If we didn’t change, the growth we were experiencing would not have been sustainable.

When I was born the population of the world was 3 billion, today it is 7.7 billion. When I was young there was well over twice as much room to play and well under half as many mouths to feed. Those born just ten years before me had three times as much room to play, compared to today, and one third as many mouths to feed. Many of my generation now cry ‘why can’t we just keep things the way they were’.

Here’s two reasons – during my lifetime the population of most vertebrate species has declined by 60% and the number of fish in the sea has more than halved

One hundred years ago the population was small enough (1.8 billion) that no matter what they did it had no material effect on the natural world – today our individual actions multiplied by 7.7 billion are having a material effect on nearly everything!!

If we are to be good stewards of, and live sustainably and responsibly on, this more populated wonder-filled planet, restructuring and change is required.

One article I read, to promote the burning of fossil fuels, said that coal was a wonderful gift given by God to help us create cheap energy – this was certainly true when 1 billion people, with modest energy needs, embarked on the industrial revolution – it is far from true today.

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest – if you don’t like what I have said above, please don’t read on, it gets much worse.

And now to the title…

The book of God’s words (scriptures) and the book of God’s works (science) are often pitched against each other. In the extreme, exclusive proponents of each see the other as the source of all evil.

I wish to assert that both books are truth and a balanced, expansive, abundant life is found in embracing both.

Let me be extreme:

I believe that ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ – I believe that Genesis and all scripture is pure truth inspired by God and that it succinctly and profoundly describes the nature of man and our relationship with God.

The ‘book of His words’ and the story that it tells is so beautiful that it causes my heart to sour in wonder.

I believe that the earth and the heavens are billions of years old and creative and evolutionary processes were used by God to fashion us and the world. Every new discovery whether it is found through a microscope a telescope or in a rock writes a new chapter in the book of God’s works.

The ‘book of His works’ is so beautiful that it causes my heart to sour in wonder.

The book of God’s words (scripture) is not diminished by the book of His work’s (science) and

The book of God’s work’s (science) is not diminished by the book of His words (scripture),

to try and reconcile them together and make them equivalent is to diminish them both

If you embrace the book of God’s words (scripture) and reject the book of His works (science) it leads to isolation and irrelevance.

If you embrace the book of God’s works (science) and reject the book of His words (scripture) it leads to nihilism – meaninglessness

For me Genesis is a story of history emerging from revelation and I’m not sure where the boundary is.

I think this because the language of the early chapters of Genesis (Moses’ revelation of the beginning of time), at the beginning of the bible, is very similar to the language of the book of Revelation (John’s revelation of the end of time), at the end of the bible.  

For example, the Tree of Life and the Serpent are only seen in these two books – they are found in the first three and the last three chapters of the bible and not in any other of its books.

Both Genesis and Revelation describe series of seven events, listed one after the other with the seventh having the greatest significance.

In the bible this structure is only found in these two books.

In Genesis, the events are the six days of creation culminating in a day of rest on the seventh day – the Sabbath. Interestingly the six days of creation are only mentioned twice more in the old testament (that I can find), Sabbath, the day of rest, is mentioned hundreds of times – a very different focus than that of our western minds…

In the book of Revelation we see the opening of the seven seals, seven trumpets, seven plagues, seven bowls of God’s wrath.

We do not promote the literal interpretation of the book of Revelation and neither should we of the early chapters of Genesis.

Genesis overflows with profound, foundational truth – I just don’t think it is literal.

I love John’s revelation of the beginning of time – it is 100% focused on why:

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it… The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.’ ‘…to all who … receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God’

It is only from the book of His words that we can know about things that are eternal:

‘where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part …, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears… And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’

It is only through the book of His works (science) that we can understand the true complexity of the physical world around us, both past and present, and how we can care for and live sustainably in it.

My hope is that you will embrace both books fully

Extreme Balance – the Servant Leader

(This post will make more sense if you read extreme balance first)

We can be guilty of thinking that God promotes the role of a servant because it best describes our position relative to Him – and not realise that He does it because…

He is a servant

it is His nature

it is who He is

and we are to be like Him.

It isn’t possible to separate love and service and God is love

He loves us and He serves us!

Even as I write the words it feels wrong – but it’s not, it’s just extreme

I spoke in church a few months ago (when we did that – pre COVID-19) and asked the congregation to close their eyes and imagine God the Father appearing before them

Our natural reaction would be to fall in worship

I then asked them to imagine God lifting them up and putting them back in their seats and then beginning to wash their feet

I’m sure we would say like Peter, when Jesus (God with us) rose from the table and began to wash his feet, ‘Lord you will never wash my feet’

And He might say – ‘you are only able to be in my presence because I served you in a manner that makes washing feet look like nothing’

Listen to Jesus’ words in this remarkable parable

‘It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them’

I start with this end of the balance pole because it is the hardest for us to fathom (even though most of our prayers are requests for God’s Service)

He is also the Creator and Ruler of all things

When He speaks His words ‘never return without accomplishing what He desires’ – that is absolute unquestioned authority

Our minds cannot comprehend the extent of His authority and the terror of His presence

‘Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them’

We cannot overstate how extreme His Authority and Power is

and yet

His Service to us is not diminished by His Authority over us

And His Authority is not diminished by His Service

This is extreme balance

In Jesus’ words ‘… whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Note, He did not say, don’t aspire to be great or first, He said to be great you must also be small and to be first you must also be last – extreme balance

The scriptures refer to us in equal measure as servants and as sons and daughters of God

The servant serves and the son or daughter rules in the Father’s name

We are not one or the other we are both

The more we embrace both the more balanced/stable we will be

The story of the Prodigal Son illustrates the problem of serving without ruling and ruling without serving

The older brother ‘served his father and never disobeyed a command’ but didn’t seem to realise the authority he had as a son, as a result he was bitter, angry, small minded and divisive

The younger brother knew the power of his inheritance but nothing of serving and as a result he became self-serving and lost everything

When the younger brother, the prodigal son, returned home a broken man, he intended to be as ‘one of his father’s hired servants’ but his father placed a ring, signifying his authority, on his finger. Perhaps he was now in the perfect place to live a balanced fruitful life.

We don’t know how the story ends for each of these brothers; it would have been good to see a second series.

If you rule or exercise power without serving, what you build, whether it is an empire, a company, a church a family or a person, might only be as strong and last as long as you

If you serve without ruling you might not build anything at all

If you rule and serve, you might participate in building something that last forever and enjoy an expansive life

‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor (serving), Mighty God (ruling), Everlasting Father (ruling), Prince of Peace (serving). Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end….’

Extreme Balance – how hard should we work?

(this post will make more sense if you read Extreme Balance first)

I have often reflected on the relationship between God’s provision and our effort.

In the Lord prayer, the phrase ‘give us this day our daily bread’ is a reference to the mana that God provided for the Israelite’s to eat in the wilderness. It was given – on the day – for the day, if the Israelite’s took more than they needed it rotted – it was ‘this day’s daily bread’. It was the supernatural provision of food. God said that he did this to ‘humble them so that they would learn that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’.

We were created by the word of God and are sustained by what He continues to speak over us.

Jesus said ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore, do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For … your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.’

’Every good and perfect gift is from above…’

Paul said ‘my God shall supply all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus’

Truth 1 – If we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness all our needs will be met.

Do we need to work at all if God is going to supply all our needs?

The bible also says ‘if you don’t work you don’t eat’ this implies that that what we eat comes from our labours – there was to be no eating for the lazy.

Adam was placed in the garden to ‘work it and keep it’

And then there is the parable that Jesus gave of the talents (a talent is a lot of money, maybe a million dollars). The master (God) gave three of his servants 5, 2 and 1 million dollars according to their ability and then went away. When he returned the servants given 5 and 2 million dollars had doubled their money and the master was pleased and said he would give them more. The one with one million dollars had hidden it because he was afraid of the master and gave it back to him without increase. The master was furious and took the million dollars off him and gave it to the servant with 10 million.

Paul said, ‘But if anyone does not provide for his own family, especially for his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.’

Truth 2 – God wants us to be industrious and productive and provide for ourselves and those around us.

Obviously these two truths need balancing

I propose that extreme balance is required, we need to believe and embrace both to their extreme not limiting one by the other but letting them both have full expression.

I propose that the truly balanced view is that who we are and what we achieve is 100% due to Gods provision and the Words that He continues to speak over us

and

I propose that who we are and what we achieve is 100% due to our industry and effort

When we have an intimate relationship with God our lives are multiplied with His (see ‘The Power of Zero …’) and

Our 100% x His 100% = 100% of who we are and what we achieve

You might think, well why do I need God then – I can just work hard and get the same result

The parable of the talents answers this, the most gifted servant would have worked hard and only achieved his wages if the master hadn’t given him 5 million to invest. His 100% with the masters 100% was very different to his 100% without the master.

In my experience when I believe it’s entirely up to me:

I work too hard

I become anxious

My family suffers

My relationships suffer

It’s all mine

I become proud

The future looks uncertain and

I hold onto things too tightly

When I think it’s all God and nothing is required from me:

I give back to God exactly what He gave me, and nobody is happy!

When I live in extreme balance:

All my labour is ‘unto the Lord’

My family flourishes

I am not alone

I am confident and even courageous

I take responsibility but not ownership

I expect solutions to unsolvable problems

I hold things lightly and don’t suffocate them

I have concern and not anxiety

I know when I have enough and don’t always need more

I give

I’m thankful

I take pride but am not proud

Failures are not fatal because ‘all things work together for good…’

I work hard but not to exhaustion

I achieve things beyond anything I could have imagined and

I see the big picture because I seek first His kingdom and His righteousness

–

live abundantly!

Extreme Balance – Jesus Wept

(this post will make more sense if you read Extreme Balance first)

The easiest verse in the bible to remember but one of the hardest to understand is ‘Jesus wept’

Lazarus, a friend of Jesus’, is dead and has been in the tomb for four days

Jesus has arrived to raise him from the dead – there is no doubt in Jesus’ mind that this will happen, we know this because …

He told His disciples that this sickness would ‘not end in death’

And again, ‘Lazarus is (dead)…I am going there to wake him up’

He told Martha (Lazarus’ sister) that her brother ‘will rise again’ and that He, Jesus, was ‘the resurrection and the life’

He said in prayer, to his heavenly Father, at the tomb, ‘I thank you that you have heard Me – You always hear Me’

There was no doubt in Jesus’ mind that Lazarus would rise

The greatest miracle ever seen by man was about to take place

Everyone who was distraught including Mary and Martha, His closest friends, would soon be full of Joy

Jesus had extreme faith

I think He should have been full of excitement

Instead, it twice says that Jesus was ‘deeply moved’ when he saw the grief of His friends, and then it says…

‘Jesus wept’

Why?

Perhaps it’s because, at that moment Lazarus was dead, and He felt his friend’s grief – which was real and overwhelming

Jesus lived fully in the present

This is a beautiful picture of extreme faith and extreme works, which are the practical outworking of God’ love, balanced perfectly

It’s not uncommon for Christians to find it difficult, while having faith for a future miracle, to know how to live and relate to the present

Do you pretend that it has already happened by faith and deny the present suffering or

Do you embrace the present suffering and not truly believe for a miracle?

Jesus demonstrated that we are to do both fully and completely

Don’t diminish one to accommodate the other

Throw out both arms wide and live abundantly

Extreme Balance

We often come across people who seem unbalanced

…they are sometimes too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use or

…too earthly minded to be of any heavenly use

Anyone who has watched the movie, or seen actual footage, of Philippe Petit walking on a tight rope between the twin towers in New York, has seen extreme balance

On August 7th, 1974 at 6:00 am in the morning, using a 25-foot long balancing pole, Petit stepped off the south tower onto a wire 110 stories above the streets of New York City. With “extreme fear, and great joy and pride,” he crossed to the north tower and sat down on the corner of the building. Dream accomplished. Then the south tower beckoned to him. In a 45-minute period, while a huge crowd gathered below, Petit made eight crossings on the 134-foot long wire. He sat, lay down, and danced on the wire before exiting into the arms of policemen – I, for one, breathed a sigh of relief when he did.

This walk demonstrated extreme courage, extreme balance and the benefit of mass moment of inertia

This Blog is more about balance and mass moment of inertia than courage – however you will need courage to be balanced

Mass moment of inertia is a measure of an object’s (Petit’s and the pole’s) resistance to rotating (falling off the wire)

In equation form, the poles mass moment of inertia is:

Pole mass moment of inertia = 1/12 x pole mass x (pole length)2

If you have a balancing pole, you will be more stable the greater its mass and the greater its length but increasing the length of the pole (pole length2) has the biggest effect.

If you have ever tried to balance yourself on a beam you will have instinctively thrown out your arms to increase your mass moment of inertia

A few clues from Petit about extreme balance

Hold the pole in the middle

(This is obvious – but you need to make sure you have equal weight and length on each side)

Make the pole as long as you can handle

(this maximises your mass moment of inertia and hence stability)

I propose that balance in life doesn’t come from constraining the truth and trying to reign everything in to the bland middle

it comes from understanding and equally applying truths, that seem poles apart and in opposition to each other, to the extreme – the longer the pole the better – as long as you are holding it in the middle.

I think this is the key to an ‘abundant life’

Here is a list of some seemingly opposing truths:

Faith and Works

Justice and Mercy

Law and Grace

Life and Death

Servant Leadership

Predestination and Free Will

Christ’s divinity and His humanity

If you embrace each opposing element to the extreme, not diminishing one at the expense of the other, you will lead an extremely balanced (abundant) life

‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly’

The next few Blogs will look at what extreme balance looks like in practice

Holy Logic

I had a simple realisation about holiness the other day – it’s not what I thought it was:  

(please follow this logic)

If holiness = sinlessness or moral perfection

And if sin is the breaking of God’s laws

         Then holiness = the perfect keeping of God’s laws

According to Jesus there are only two laws:

Thou Shalt love the Lord with all your heart
Thou Shalt love your neighbour as yourself

There are no ‘thou-shalt-not’ laws – so holiness is not defined by what you don’t do

There are only ‘thou-shalts’ – so holiness is achieved by DOING, it is active

Both ‘shalts’ are to do with love – therefore holiness can only be defined in the context of love

Love can’t exist outside of a relationship

therefore holiness can’t exist outside of a relationship

Holiness is only defined in and by loving relationships

So when we say God is holy we are saying that He is in continuous loving relationship

When God says we are to be holy he is saying that we are to continuously act in love  

We can sometimes think of holiness as being “apart from”, “aloof”, “holier than thou” or “separate from” – it turns out it is the opposite

Jesus was a friend of tax collectors and sinners – true holiness is attractive

His holiness was defined by these relationships it wasn’t separate from them

This is our primary quest as Christians

You will find, if you think about the things that cause you to stumble and make you feel unholy, that these things are mostly, if not all, due to a distortion, perversion or absence of love

We are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength

Everything flows from this – as we are in relationship with Him and experience His holiness – his perfect continuous relationship of love – we are made whole


“But as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

The river of life is a trickle at its source

I was reminded recently, through the death of my cousin John, of the profound effect that one person can have on the lives of those around them. The person often doesn’t know the impact that they have had.

Ezekiel, a prophet in the bible, was shown a vision of the river of life. The amazing thing about this river was that it began as a trickle coming out from the temple and as it flowed it grew. Ezekiel was told to walk in the water in the direction it was travelling. At 500 m from its source the water was up to his ankles in another 500 m it was up to his knees, in another 500 m it was up to his waist and then in another 500 m it was water to swim in, a river that no one could cross.

The word translated as trickle is a Hebrew word that means unstable or tears and brings to mind the instability and weakness of a trickle of water.

Jesus said that out of our innermost being shall flow rivers (plural) of living water – what we imagine is great power gushing out of us lifting up and carrying people in its wake. We don’t see this happening so we believe that rivers don’t flow from us – probably because we are unworthy!

Perhaps all of these rivers leave us as faltering trickles and occasionally tears of living water

Perhaps it doesn’t matter about the quantity or apparent power of the flow, perhaps what matters is the source of the water

Jesus said, to a very lost lady he had asked for a drink of water – ‘If you knew who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’

Ezekiel saw that the river flowed from the sanctuary into the dead sea, the world, and where the river flows everything lives.

As a young man John became a Christian and influenced my parents to start attending the Salvation Army. This grew into a river of life in all our lives.

My cousin John was killed when the ultralight aircraft he was flying crashed in the Northern Territory in October.

Vale John

A simple equation for marriage

Even after 40 years of marriage the simple equation in this blog prompts me daily to re-evaluate my actions.

I introduced in the last Blog how the bible describes marriage in terms of a multiplication equation

‘… a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.’

Two (2) become one.  1 and 1 equal 1 through multiplication

1 x 1 = 1   two (2) become one (1)

We can say that the couple’s lives, because of an intimate relationship, are multiplied together they are not merely added to each other

This Blog is about the importance of wholeness – if you understand the implications of this simple equation, and act accordingly, it will transform your marriage

I’m sorry but you will need to understand the multiplication of fractions for this…

½ x 1 = ½ – a half multiplied by 1 equals a half

If one of the factors is less than 1 the result is less than 1

½ x ½ = ¼ – a half multiplied by a half equals a quarter

If both factors are less than 1, the result is less than each of the factors!

Sometimes people get married thinking that they are adding someone to themselves and therefore increasing their life – what they often find instead is that they feel diminished or less than they were before

…. when they feel diminished, they tear the other person down, blaming them – making them less, and find that they feel even more diminished – this is the equation at work!

No wonder divorce is on the increase

Why marry?

Adam the first man – created in the image of God – wasn’t whole – God created Eve and marriage to make him/her/them whole

Many think that they are whole before they marry – but are not – marriage makes this visible

You can only be whole when you have learned how to truly love someone through all of life’s highs and lows

God’s intention was to make mankind whole and beautiful by making them one 

Marriage puts the importance of wholeness front and center – and the urgency of love

The bible describes this equation beautifully…

‘Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy… to present her to himself as a radiant church, without … blemish, holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church – for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.’

And

‘Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly (whole) offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth’

Let loving your partner as yourself and building them up be your focus and you and your marriage will become whole.

If you are like me – you will need help (this is for single people as well)

‘He/she who is joined to the Lord becomes one Spirit with Him’ – same equations different partner – we become a recipient of the greatest love of all and are empowered to love and to be whole

‘For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’