Today it’s peaches.

Baskets of them. Beautiful blushing orbs of luscious juiciness.

Which won’t last long in their natural state.

Interesting, how real food, fresh from the veggie patch or orchard doesn’t have the shelf life of fake food full of additives and preservatives. God must have made it spoilable for a reason. Something to ponder…

Meanwhile, something must be done with these delights.

Or they’ll soon be no delight.

God appoints us stewards of our blessings, and making sensible use of them is part of that stewardship.

I come downstairs with these thoughts in my head, and there’s his English muffin, spread with peach jam, made with his own hands (we could open a business called “Jim’s Jams,” if we wanted to—and had the time!), and I think that would make a lovely and appropriate breakfast.

Ah, a sweet blessing.

There is a line, however (so easy to cross), even with sweet blessings, between sensible and excessive.

Extent is key. How much, how many, how far, in how deep?

Not just with peaches. With everything in life.

On life’s great teeter-totter, it’s quite a feat to stay balanced.

I’d like to place here a photo of a playground see-saw. But I haven’t time to go searching parks—or even photo buckets. (These baskets of bounty…)

The image in my mind really isn’t just of an empty see-saw, anyhow. It’s a memory picture from childhood of those clever boys who could jump up on the contraption and, straddling it, one foot on each side of the fulcrum, bring the board to level and hold it there.

I never envisioned myself as able to do that. Never tried. And it seems to me that keeping balance in the everyday stuff, with the great crowding conglomeration of things and experiences and seeming demands on our time and attention, poses even more of a challenge.

I teeter, then totter, and then often tumble.

And now… In today’s world there’s so much more crying for our attention than peaches.

You can teeter with too much tweeting on Twitter, and totter with too much time on You Tube. You can get bogged down in blogging, in comments and communities and all kinds of cyber obligations, that never existed two decades ago.

And we felt overloaded even then!

What’s a woman to do?

Something, definitely! Not just let it all pull you around by what screams the loudest or nags the longest or tyrannizes with the greatest urgency. Otherwise life becomes but a constant emergency of running to put out fires hither and yon, and never rising above the madness.

And where in that crazy chase is room for love—for God or fellow man?

Pushed right off the teeter-totter long ago, most likely, crashing to the ground.

It’s hard to live love while so hampered and harried.

This bears more thought. This bears more prayer. This requires stopping to get better balance on life’s see saw before playing teeter-totter again.

Which I plan to do…

As soon as I get finished with these peaches. And with… (uh-oh).

(Oh, thank God for sweet Sabbath!)

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{This is PART FOUR in a series on LIVING LOVE. PART ONE is here , PART TWO is here, and PART THREE is here.}