I ride a teeter-totter every day—the battle between my old self and my new self.

Teeter-totters. I hate them. I love them. I always have.

Teetering in the sky

I am first thinking of “real” teeter-totters. The teeter-totters of my childhood. Don’t imagine the sissy seesaws that playgrounds sport today. Think of teeter-totters that are so long they lift a totterer high enough to touch airplanes.

They were fun. Delightful. Even exhilarating. As long as the person on the other side of the seesaw wasn’t twice my size. When I was four years old, I didn’t understand the mechanics of levers and fulcrums. I did understand that the kid who is larger controls when the seesaw teeters and when it totters.

I remember the horror of being stuck 6 feet in the air (a distance about twice my height) when a Goliath-like third grader (okay, he was normal size for a nine-year-old) held me captive by sitting on the downside of the seesaw. No matter how much I screamed, he kept me perched somewhere between the clouds and the moon.

That was a day I hated seesaws.

Staying close to the ground

I still ride a seesaw every day. I love and hate it. But this seesaw is different than the teeter-totters of my childhood.

On one side of the fulcrum is the part of me that desperately desires to live for Jesus. On the other side is that part of me that desperately despises Jesus. To enjoy this teeter-totter, I must be the oversized kid. My goal is not to balance my old self, my sinful nature, with the weight of my new self. The goal is to control the old self, to outweigh him, to keep him in the place where he is my prisoner.

My old self has a competing agenda. He is determined to bulk up on selfishness, hatred, and the spiritual junk food of the culture I live in. I can’t stop his gluttony.

I don’t have to be the kid with his feet dangling in space from the top end of a seesaw. I overcome him at the table the Lord has prepared for me in the presence of this internal enemy (Psalm 23:5). The weight of the silver and gold of God’s Word (Psalm 12:6) tips those scales in my direction. The water weight of my baptism with its promises of adoption and forgiveness are also there (1 Peter 3:21). The banquet of my Savior’s Communion meal adds to my spiritual heft (1 Corinthians 10:16). And I have Christian friends to call on, iron that sharpens iron (Proverbs 27:17). They outweigh my old self and help pull me down from my aerie prison.

The seesaw battle is winnable. But it is a battle. A battle I’ll permanently win on the day I reach heaven—on the day I jump off that teeter-totter and my old self crashes to the ground, never to rise again.

I hate and love teeter-totters. It just depends on how heavy I am.

Author: James Aderman
Volume 112, Number 08
Issue: August 2025