Wireless sensor networks are a popular tool for tasks that require remote monitoring of an environment. However, sensor networks are often deployed with resource imbalances that cause inefficiencies in the operation of such networks. A common resource imbalance is the distribution of battery power among the sensor nodes. This imbalance is often caused by faster energy depletion of sensor nodes near a sink node than in the remainder of the network. Modern multi-hop message passing methods tend to select a node that is located close to the sink as the last hop in the path for many different sensors, reducing its lifetime considerably. To address this problem, I propose the Bid and Rescue algorithm. Under the Bid and Rescue algorithm, sensor nodes assess the message forwarding load they experience and estimate the lifetime that their battery power will allow under such a load. If this estimated lifetime indicates that the node endangers the network by prematurely depleting energy reserves, a bidding session is carried out to rebalance the energy distribution in the network through node relocation.