Margin is Stewardship

What up, family? Uh, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this word called margin. Um, and as I was rereading the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, it's this quote that he attributes to Dallas Willard when he talks about hurry. It's a great enemy of our spiritual life. And essentially he goes on to say that we must ruthlessly eliminate it. And that got me to thinking from a practical sense, man, just how sometimes we can be praying about symptoms that, um, just the simple practice of margin or the simple discipline of margin can help us address in our life. Like, we get it in a financial sense. Like, with margin, when we have margin, if something unexpectedly comes up, we can typically address it. It eats into that margin. But what about our emotional capacity? You know, when it comes to margin, our relational, spiritual, mental, physical, all of that. Like, what about margin there? And to be fair, you know, one of the things I like, a while back, I might be butchering it, but Pastor Darius Daniels said that there are seasons in life that we will be stretched. Like, that's inevitable. However, we got— we have to make sure that those seasons don't quietly become our cycles of life. In other words, he was saying don't confuse seasons with cycles. Cycles change when we do. And so with like— to get to the point at hand is that many of you all know that my wife is in the Army Reserve as a chaplain. Like, she was deployed, she just finished up chaplain career course. And then when you marry that, you know, with my job and the ministry assignments that we walk in, having 3 kids, blended family with our boys and all this type of stuff, having a daughter that's 4, all of them are in all different type of walks of life and going through things. And so we have to have margin. And I remember just when she was away, my 4-year-old daughter had done something, man, and I just snapped for like 5, 10 seconds and I felt horrible. And so through conviction and self-awareness, I realized that she wasn't the problem. I was just depleted. And what came out of that is just I was exposed that, hey, your past your margin. And, and so, man, it was just a, just a, just a lesson, hard lesson by the Holy Spirit. So of course I talked to her and things like that, and I had to start learning that, hey man, wait a minute, you're still saying yes to stuff like you're not at your capacity. Your yeses are a lot more expensive right now. And that's a whole nother thing, because sometimes I think, especially in the ministry sense, we think that when we tell certain people, leaders or whatever, or people like when they're trying to do something, no, uh, it's almost that we run it as we're saying no to God. But you can say yes God and no to people. Uh, now we can get into a posture thing, but I don't have time for that right now. But it, but it's very possible to say no to people, uh, especially in the season, and still yes to God. Let's not confuse the two. Again, whole nother conversation for another day. And so I just believe that when it comes to, uh, this word, we just need to just practice it better. Um, we just need to make sure that, you know, we have more availability availability to the people, um, that, that matter, that matters in our life. We need to make sure that we have— that we can steward things properly because we are to be faithful stewards. And so I would rather have an honest no rather than a reluctant yes from someone, and how I'm going to give it because I'm not going to harvest that conflict within. So in all of that being said, man, I just want to encourage you as well as challenge you like I'm challenging myself to pay attention to where you're most depleted in life. And then maybe, just maybe, that's where margin might need to show up the most in your life. So just like Dallas Willard said, man, hurry— this constant state of hurry, we need to, uh, ruthlessly eliminate it from our life.