The Need for Margin

As part of a homework assignment from the King's Seminary, I have been reading a great book this morning entitled, "The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits" by Dr. Richard Swenson.

I shared a few short quotes on Twitter, but here are a couple worth passing on that just won't fit within 140 characters…!

How did Jesus care for people? He focused on the person standing in front of Him at the time…

…If Jesus had chosen to live in modern America instead of ancient Israel, how would He act? Would He have consulted a pocket calendar? Would He have worn a watch? Would He have carried a beeper? Can you imagine Him being paged out of the Last Supper?...

…When I look deeper at the life of Christ, I also notice that there is no indication that He worked twenty-four hour ministry days. He went to sleep each night without having healed every disease in Israel – and He apparently slept well. Neither did He minister to everybody who needed it. Neither did He visit or teach everybody who needed it. There were many needs that He simply chose not to meet…

...Is this to imply that He was lazy or didn't care? Of course not. But it is to imply that He understood what it meant to be human…and His fully human side understood what it meant to have limits. Jesus understood what it meant to prioritize and to balance in light of those limits and how to focus on the truly important. We can learn a lesson from Jesus – it's okay to have limits. It is okay not to be all things to all people all of the time all by ourselves…

…Margin is the space between our load and our limits…

…Margin allows availability for the purposes of God. When God taps us on the shoulder and asks us to do something, he doesn't expect to get a busy signal…

…"In the spiritual life," explains the theologian Henri Nouwen, "the word discipline means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act.' Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from filling up…to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on."