I share a roof with teenagers which means that things get easily out of proportion. To their developing brains and in their acute season of identity-formation, a shrunken favorite shirt or a bad hair day feels like an enormously large deal.

I wish I could say that I always stand back as an impartial parent balanced with perfect proportion. But the reality is that I am sucked into their warped sense of proportion and have my own existing warped weights. As a recovering perfectionist, I have to constantly battle against placing far too much weight on academic or athletic excellence rather than allowing God’s view of success (which often looks like weakness, dependence, and mistakes followed by lessons and repentance) to carry the greater weight.

Idols misshape our perception like the contorted mirrors in those fun houses at the fair. Inside our flesh and in our world, things that are meant to be huge, like the weight of a soul or tending to a relationship with the God of universe, feel slight while things which are really insignificant (like a child’s youth sports game or bad day at work) feel massively heavy.

The scales of my sinful heart are tared according to a truncated timetable. The flesh, the world, and the enemy measure everything by what we can see and feel now. The Spirit and the Word offer a very different scale that is properly weighted in light of eternal life.

Years ago, I memorized a prayer written by Pastor John Piper that I pray when I find myself living out of proportion (which is far more often than I care to admit).

“Fight for us, O God, that we not drift numb and blind and foolish into vain and empty excitements. Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst. We fear our bent to trifling. Make us awake to the weight of glory. Amen.”

In the Old Testament, one of the Hebrew word translated glory is kabad which means weight.

In Isaiah 42: 8 God says, “I am the Lord; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.” Oh, how I wish I could say I never gave glory or ascribed weight to things that were not worthy of such weight. But I do it all the time.

God, his Word, and his Ways are to carry the heaviest weight in our lives. They are the substance and reality from which every other substance and reality is derived. One way to think of worship is worth-ship: ascribing proper weight to things which deserve that weight. Said another way, the things which weigh heavy on us show us what or whom we are practically worshipping and serving.

I wrote this poem as a prayer to be prayed every week on my Sabbath as a desperate request that God will allow me and my loved ones to live with a right sense of proportion.

Proper proportion

The scales of this world are tared assuming brevity.
But God’s scales assume an eternal longevity. 

The world calls a feather a pound and God’s weight naught.
To live with proper proportion is something Spirit-taught. 

The senses of the saint are all-too-easily skewed—
We need the living Word of God through our lives imbued. 

With your kabod, light things gather glorious weight,
While the seemingly heavy loses its freight.

Oh Savior, set for scales of our souls aright;
Let us live with proper proportion by Your light.