A Labyrinthine Journey: Soon Coming in 3-D

Here is a headline you probably won’t see too often:

Homeostasis: Friend, Foe, Gift

Before you really think I have gone off the deep end, let me unpack this some for you. Homeostasis is a sort of internal gyroscope that is always trying to keep life steady. You can see it in action if you spin a wheel and then try to tilt that wheel from side to side. You will feel the wheel resisting that action. It does change, but with a lot of energy used to change the tilt. Homeostasis is the term used by those who work in soul and psychological arenas to describe our natural tendency to want to maintain the status quo and to resist change. Sometimes that process within us is a helpful thing, sometimes it is not.

Homeostasis is a good friend to us when we go through trying and upsetting times in our lives. On a ship, when a big wave comes and tilts the deck to one side or the other, the inertial dampeners in the ship try to bring it back to an even keel. The storms of life do come at us from many different angles and they can tend to really through our lives out of balance. It is nice to know that with time, our natural tendency is toward balance. If you look back over your life you can see where you have faced many truly life-changing events, but through them all your life has pretty much re-oriented itself. At times, that is truly nice to know.

However, at certain places in our lives this process becomes a great enemy. Homeostasis is in one sense a neutral force in our lives. It does not know or care if our current “normal” is healthy for us or not. Consider when you have a bad habit you wish to change: homeostasis doesn’t know it is a bad habit, it just sees it as our normal. This is part of the power of addictions in our lives, some habits, activities, and attitudes have become so much a part of us for so long, that they are now “normal” to us. It goes the other way also. Maybe we want to develop a new routine of exercise, or eating healthy food, or even a new practice of prayer and Bible study, but we find ourselves stuck after a few weeks. The old routines of life just become easier. No matter how hard we try to will change in our lives, either to change unhealthy patterns or to begin healthy ones, we keep being pulled back to the old way of being “normal” for us.

Herein lies the gift of homeostasis: we must ask for help! If you are like me, you try to make all these changes on your own. You say to yourself that you can do this. But you and I can’t. Not without help at least. That is why people form support groups, or join classes to make some changes in life. Yet, the biggest thing we must remember to do is to pray asking for God’s help. Some changes we want to make can only happen as the Spirit of God comes into our spirits and souls and transforms us from the inside out. Then as God makes those changes with our inner orientation then our receiving and giving help to one another becomes truly gifts from God in leading us toward greater holiness and wholeness of living.