Does too much on your plate leave you full or empty?

Sitting at the dinner table last night, we had one of my favorite dishes, beef stroganoff. Needless to say since I am a big guy, I wanted to load my plate with my wife’s wonderful cooking creation. This got me thinking…

It is obvious that too much food on your plate will make you full. You put too much on your plate and you get stuffed to the point you can’t breathe. By the time you are done eating, you are sitting in your chair, fighting falling into a coma, sure you are going to get at least 10 stretch marks, and convinced you added 20 pounds to your frame. What we also know about too much on your plate is that it is unhealthy for life. Well, this really intrigued me so I thought more…

I am a husband, father of four, full time employee at Linde Gas, youth ministry leader, webmaster of a number of ministries and businesses, Boy Scout Chaplain, and… I think about this and say to myself, “self, you have way too much on your plate.” How does that make me feel? I look at all of this stuff I am doing, and how much I am giving out in the Lord on a regular basis, and it all starts to make sense why I feel like Gollum looks; drained, malnourished, thin… come to think of it, this may be why I can sometimes act like Gollum, too; talk to myself, extremely moody, angry. But I digress.

It starts to hit me that too much on my plate of life does not leave the same happy feeling I get when I gorge on Thanksgiving (this is a joke, but we all know how exciting the senses get when we get around tons of rich tasty food). Too much on the plate of life makes me feel empty and weak. It makes me feel like I have to do finish it all myself. I think this is exactly what the devil wants. Without getting too spiritual (since I don’t have a Bible handy right now) this act of filling my plate with “good things” keeps me feeling, though I am working for the Lord on most of these things, I am becoming too empty because there is so much to do. To add to this that I am spending so much time to do these things, and I end up doing them in the flesh. Then, there is so much that needs my attention outside of my family that I end up leaving them feeling empty too!

So, as I look at it, too much on my dinner plate can be bad for me, leaving me too full. Too much on my life plate leaves not only me, but also everyone in my sphere empty. I guess I will need to be more like Martin Luther. He once said he had so much to do that he had to spend an extra hour in prayer to accomplish it all.