Niki Anderson ~ Author & Speaker

       I didn’t grow up with horses but I know the sound of hoof beats. Many a stampede has charged my way and left me trampled.

       “But you’re still alive!” you say. True. Painful recoveries are enough incentive to figure out how to avoid the advance of unrelenting demands galloping toward me like a hundred stallions.

       While striving for balance, I’ve made cuts in my schedule, yet heard myself still whimpering. “I do only what’s necessary but I’m still overrun!” My refrain may also be yours. It’s the second in a list of eight complaints we utter as we work toward balance.

       Things I deem necessary are basic responsibilities related to each day. Eat, groom, pray, work, meet, exercise, sleep, serve, parent, and care-give are a sampling. Though decisive in my resolve to avoid overload, even the seemingly necessary can leave me breathing puffs of hoof dust.

       Long ago, with pious outlook I’d tell myself, “It’s all necessary.” Victimized, I’d surrender to every call, eventually applaud myself for my discipline, and give a martyr’s testimony. “It was all for the Lord.” Did I leave off the part about my racing footsteps and adrenaline-powered emotions?

       Work as I do to live balanced, the thunder of hoof beats is seldom far away. But I’ve grown. Now I recognize the heavy rhythm of hoofs; I smell the sweat of the stampede; I’ve learned the way of escape. For starters, I move from the pathway.

       Not only stepping aside, I step up. Into a grandstand where God and I survey the stallions of responsibility that were hard at my heels. I look them over perhaps for a second or third time as the day progresses and as the hope of completing “the necessary” is slipping away.

       Life is not a steeplechase. I need a moderate pace and Spirit-advised choices among the tasks before me. Definitions for variations of the word necessary don’t help. The words necessary, obligatory, mandatory, and compulsory carry so closely the same meaning, it’s like splitting hairs to define their differences. So how do I choose?

       Jesus clarified what’s necessary when he spoke of the guideline that marked his life. “…whatever the Father does, the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.” John 5:19-20

       From the grandstand, we perceive what the Father is doing, and as sons, we choose to do as He does. If we watch the Father with our spiritual eyes and follow behind as He leads, by day-end, we’ll realize what was divinely necessary and what can happen tomorrow, or the next, or beyond.

       God knows we’ll seldom complete all we expect of ourselves. If we believe He is sovereign over time, we’ll peacefully resign to the limit it places on the fulfillment of our own to-do lists, and we’ll discover peace and delight in completing his.

“Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Proverbs 19:21 NIV

copyright 2010, Niki Anderson, request permission for reprint