I remember a helpful tactic when two kids wanted the last of the pie. 

 

"One of you cuts it in half, and the other gets to choose." In that moment the weight of responsibility shifted from me to the child with the knife. It turns out that it isn't easy to divide evenly, at least to the satisfaction of hungry children whose eyes are inches from the crust. Their interest is piqued, because even a four year old remembers that pie is sweet. 

 

In a recent annual report there was a pie chart about how expenses are dispersed within the organization. Having recently joined the staff  I was curious. It is prudent to have a visual assessment of how we use our resources. 

 

Sometimes there is an imbalance of attention, and we can lose our bearings. When I look at the whole of the bible, for instance, or the teachings of the church I belong to, the breadth of wisdom there is broad. I could try to parse out the consideration I allot to various slices of God's word. Am I focusing on just one of the commandments to the exclusion of the others? 

 

Emanuel Swedenborg covers a lot of ground in his theological works. Twenty thousand pages is not an overstatement, written with a feather pen. Within that expansive treatise, some topics get a wider portion, while others are scarcely a sliver. Just that awareness alone informs me about the degree of importance God gives each subject. 

 

There is one area that shows up a lot. More than a lot. The warning comes disguised in words I can easily dismiss, like "beware love of self" or "shun the love of dominion". But really the street name for such behavior is "stop telling other people how to live." To that end I intend to hand back the responsibility to the person actually living it.  It occurs to me that of all the guidance that God offers me about following his example, this one is the whole pie. 

 

Plus the sweetest dessert I know of is when we let God do the serving.