Margin Defined…

In preparation for the Live, Free, Conference Call I’ll be hosting for the ARC on Thursday, September 23rd, We’re talking about Margin this week.

Today I want to give a working definition for the idea or concept of Margin. So here you go…

“The distance between where you are and your limits.”

The obvious illustration is the margins on a piece of paper. It’s the white space between the edge of the paper and that little red line. I love it. Even paper manufacturers knew that we (as kids) would be prone to push the limits in our lives, so they gave us a bright red line to basically scream:

“Hey kid, STOP! You’re gonna run out of paper and write on your desk and then your teacher is gonna yell at you and all your friends will make fun of you and you’ll feel like a stinkin’ idiot, so STOP!!!”

And yet… even with the wonderful red line, how often did we try and push the limits and write all the way to the edges?!?

Some things never change do they?

Unfortunately for many of us, (and especially those of us in ministry,) we don’t have little red lines anymore warning us that we’re pushing our limits. Consequently, we plunge ahead with commitments and e-mails and appointments and deadlines and stressful situations and little sleep. And more times than we’d like to admit, we end up writing on the desk somewhere and our marriage breaks down or our kids rebel, or we compromise morally, or we have a financial breakdown.

And all the kids in the world look over at our desk and say, “See, another one bites the dust.” And the moral authority of the message we proclaim becomes tainted or dilluted or compromised in some way.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We gotta get this figured out, & I’m convinced that margin is the answer to the problem.

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To be apart of the Conference Call on Sept. 23rd @ 11 am EDT:

• Call 312-878-0222 at 11 am EDT time to be on with us, then enter the code 327-645-673.