Bruce Miller, founder and senior pastor of McKinney Christian Fellowship in McKinney, Texas, tackles stressful living in a new way with Your Life in Rhythm (Tyndale House Publishers). Miller offers a new way of living—coordinating a person's life strategies to coincide with different points in life—and rejects the typical idea and constraints of balance.
"The concept of balance has never made sense to me," Miller says. "Maybe, in some way, I've rebelled against it, that I should live a balanced life. In my own church and among people that I'm with, I hear over and over again how stressed people are and how they can't balance everything."
Surveying the lives of various biblical figures, Miller believes the concept of balance is not only unrealistic but also unbiblical.
"When you look at Jesus, Paul, Abraham, Moses, it's hard to consider their lives balanced under any notion of what that might mean," he says. "Biblical principles such as sacrifice or 'take up your cross and follow Me' don't sound too balanced."
Instead, Miller promotes the idea of life cycles, which sometimes require more effort and devotion. These include life stages and life seasons—starting a new job, a period of grief or even tax season. He also advises readers to discard expectations that don't fit the season of life, freeing themselves of the burden of spinning too many plates.
"In the middle of raising young kids, someone asked me to be on a board," he says. "I made a decision to release the expectation that I would serve on a board."
Those expectations of normalcy should be eased in crunch times, Miller says. For new mothers, they should let go of the burden of expecting to maintain their normal workout or devotional schedule. Someone recovering from an automobile accident should also let go of the expectations of life returning to normal too quickly.
"There are times of exertion and times of renewal," he says.
The book provides questions for readers to discover their own life strategies and rhythm, which Miller says would work not only for Christians and church environments but also in the corporate world.
"I really do believe that if people would live a rhythmic life, they would experience more peace because they would relax about a lot of stuff," he says. "They would find more hope in anticipating what's next and more joy when you find the time to be present where you are in whatever moment God has you in."
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