A Little More Margin, Please

The irony of this post is that I only have about ten minutes to work on it because it’s almost after school time and while sometimes they are content to watch a movie or play with their dollhouses or color and let me work, the reality is that too often I get interrupted and lose my train of thought.


Sort of like right now.  


For the past couple of days I have been trying to find enough time when my mind was clear and my kids were occupied and my husband was not home to write this post.  But it’s hard to find that extra time in a day cluttered with errands and commitments and phone calls from “paid area solicitors” and dishes and laundry and email and did I mention I subbed two full days this week?  


On Tuesday night when I was hyperventilating a little bit because I hadn’t folded the girls clothes and I hadn’t followed my own chore schedule and I hadn’t had a bath and I was just so tired and I wanted to blog but my mind was too frazzled—it hit me.  I shared a tip with my MOPS girls the other Friday that I hadn’t been following myself.  


Life needs margin.  As in white space.  Extra time.  Decompression.  A few moments every day to breathe.  And I had overbooked myself this week and was rapidly spiraling downward into perfectionist-induced meltdown.  


Insert margin.  I just needed some time to be mindless.  To chop vegetables or fold towels or sweep a floor or read a few pages of a book or write a blog.  Just a bit of time when I didn’t feel so compressed by my not-so-need- to-do list.  Time when no one was pulling on me or at me.


Then today I opened my well -worn copy of this book and read these words:


As workers for God we have to learn to make room for God – to give God “elbow room.” We calculate and estimate, and say that this and that will happen, and we forget to make room for God to come in as He chooses.