Margins

Creating margins in our lives is an incredibly important subject, however, one that we perhaps do not often give enough thought to doing. We in some ways may do it intuitively but also run the risk of not paying attention to this important issue if we do not plan for it.

Margins? Margins are the spaces we need in life to renew, refresh and restore ourselves in between our busy moments in life. Some people create margin by sleeping in, some by going out and doing something they enjoy, others by reading or whatever gives you the opportunity to refill your spiritual, emotional or physical "tanks". When we are constantly booked up and running from one event to another, we use up our spiritual, emotional or physical resources much like a car uses fuel from the gas tank. At some point, we have to make a purposeful stop and fill it up again. Margin is when and where this happens for us on the spiritual, emotional and physical level.

Some may say that they actually like being booked up and running all of the time, that they wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they were not busy. Some people do find that activity does fill a need in their lives. That is, if everything continues to go smoothly. An analogy might be like the person who has multiple credit cards with maxed balances. They can keep up with the minimum payments just fine, so what's the problem? Well, everything is fine until something goes wrong. Illness, loss of job, an accident, you know, Murphy's Law applies to our lives. Something will eventually hiccup in our "running like clockwork" world and then it seems everything comes apart. This is the problem with not having margin in our lives. It is deceptive to think that everything is fine running at 100% all of the time until it isn't fine anymore. I have found that long periods of stability are always followed by seasons of instability. How we survive the seasons of instability is predicated on how well we create margin into our lives in the long periods of stability. Going back to the credit card analogy, if we use the long periods of stability to prepare ourselves as best we can to pay off our debt, the better we will weather the period of instability whatever it may be.

Jesus was an excellent model of creating margin. Often just before or just after a big event or significant moment, Jesus would retreat to a "lonely place" for prayer either with his disciples or alone. It must have been an important time for him to reconnect with the Father for renewing his spiritual, emotional or physical strength. David throughout his life also sought margin. A common phrase you will read as you follow David's life is, "he encouraged himself in the Lord". Many of the Psalms that David wrote also speak to margin, Psalm 23 is perhaps the most obvious as he speaks of "green pastures and still waters", "he restores my soul" and other illustrative phrases.

A friend of mine is going through one of the most significant emotional challenges of his life. His wife, one that was perceptively the perfect picture of health, experienced a catastrophic heart attack. He blogs about what a toll this has taken on him emotionally. She is miraculously recovering by the way thanks to God's grace. But because of his discipline of prayer, Bible study and a healthy lifestyle, he has had the margin to absorb the stress of watching his wife struggle to survive. Life just has too many unpredictable twists for us to live on the edge all of the time. We need margin in our lives.

We each need to inventory our souls and see if we are living too much on the edge, counting on the deception that life will always be manageable. What can you do to refill your spiritual, emotional and physical tanks on a regular basis? What can you do now in the stable moment of your life that will prepare you for less stable times? Wisdom comes from God as the Holy Spirit leads us and directs us if we take the time to listen. I encourage you to take the time.