Confession: I’ve lived without much margin in my life for the last few years.
You know, that space between the have-to’s and you should’s and just gotta’s?
Work, grad school, my first book, so many good things reduced those edges to narrow lines and my weary self spilled red onto them.
Would I do it again?
Yes, absolutely.
Because packed onto those skinny pages of my life are also some of the greatest God adventures I’ve experienced.
Beautiful, wonder-making moments. Challenges overcome. Lessons learned.
But we can’t live without margins forever.
I find myself, suddenly, in a new place where that space is reappearing.
I bike with my husband more.
I talk on the phone a little longer to the people I love.
I’m with my family on a trip to Alaska this week.
I’ve been thinking back to Junior High, to those scribbled notes on the borders of notebooks.
I heart so and so.
Swirls.
Flowers.
Clouds.
The stuff of joy.
And I realize that in the pursuit of all that’s good and grown-up, I’ve somehow lost touch with childlike faith. The kind that tells you it’s okay to breathe deep for a moment, to fall in love with life again, to color outside the lines.
The margins of life are the playgrounds of our souls.
Can we stay there always? Not this side of heaven with families to raise, work to do, and all the other good things God entrusts to us.
But can we intentionally visit?
Yes.
I beieve God is right there with us in middle of the busy.
But He’s also on the borders of our lives, those spaces unfilled in our calendar.
He calls our name and we run to Him, children again, dancing on the pages of the story of our lives where this world and the next begin to blur.
Perhaps the edges of our lives are really the center of joy.
And “the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). So it just might be that in the spaces where there is less, we discover more of what we really need for all we are, all we do.
What helps you create more margin in your life?
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