Setting the Margins Wide Enough

I just finished reading an email from a parent at the children's school, regarding collecting money for the teachers' Christmas gift checks.  There has been a change in leadership for this endeavor, and the emails have been flying, as information from previous years is consolidated and passed along.  I'm in the loop in a peripheral way, so I get to read, without having to respond.

With my foot in a cast for two weeks now, I have been using the time to chip away at commitments, both single-incident and long-standing one.  The simple act of getting around takes an extraordinary amount of time, and I can't physically accomplish as much as I have in the past. 

I was laughing about this with a parent at school last week, telling her that God really, really wanted to slow me down, and He finally had to resort to this.  She asked, "So when you are back on both feet, will you slow down?'  "Certainly not!" I replied.  "I'll go twice as fast!"  I have since reconsidered.  The razor-thin time margins that come with over-scheduling, even over-scheduling with worthwhile and important activities disappear completely when crutches are involved.  And what exactly HAS all this running around and "being busy" accomplished for the long term?  Well....nothing. 

Back to the email regarding the teacher gift checks.  It appears that letters have been created to accompany the checks, each personalized with the teacher's name, and printed.  The line that caught my eye was, "Deb selected the stationery carefully so we wouldn't have to adjust our margins each year. In this way, formatting and printing was greatly simplified."  Click!  It all came together.

We all know about setting wide margins for our finances.  It's variously called, "the emergency fund," "the rainy-day fund" or "the retirement fund."  But what about setting the margins wide enough on our time, so we don't have to adjust each year, month, week or day?  If we did, wouldn't the formatting of our days be greatly simplified?

"But, I just HAVE to....." is the response, and I myself have said this, often out of guilt and especially if the project or activity is a worthy one, and ESPECIALLY if it's something at church.  But why?  It's sometimes flattering to be asked, and there is that little burst of importance that we all feel when we announce to the world, "I'm sooooo busy"...right before our chests start to tighten up from anxiety. 

We all have a purpose in life, a story-line, a plot arc.  From whence this emerges is a matter of personal belief, but no matter, the point being that it's darn-near impossible to fulfill that intended purpose if all the hours are being spent being busy.  I've experimented with scheduling twenty-eight hours worth of work for a twenty-four hour time slot, just to see if I can will the expansion of the time-space continuum, and....no, I can't.  Setting the margins wide enough will increase the odds that I will both find and fulfill my purpose, follow the intended story-line and see the beautiful arc unfold.