Cultivating the Heart: Margin
Sit down with anyone more than 5 minutes and ask, “How are you doing?” and you’re likely to hear the response, or something akin to it, “I’m just so busy.” Thinking it’s an exaggeration (because, let’s be honest, sometimes it is!), you ask your friend to recount her busy-ness.
After hearing point after point of how she is running from hither and yon for meetings at work, shuttling kids to activities, and struggling to make time for her husband, you realize that, yes, she is awfully busy.
It seems we have taken the adage “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”, and run fast and furious in the opposite direction. This lack of time quickly drains our buckets of spiritual vitality. And as it drips, it wears away our resolve to pursue the things of God. Because, quite frankly, we’re too busy for sitting still. We’re too busy to slowly read. We’re too busy to meet for unhurried coffee. We’re too busy for conversation and prayer. So we settle for tapping the quick response of “Happy Birthday” for our “friends” on Facebook rather than taking the time to call or (crazy!) write a letter.
We embrace the fact that we are spiritual and physical beings. In order to cultivate the soil of the heart, we have to do the hard and very practical work of creating space in our lives. This means getting brutally honest with ourselves and asking the hard questions of “What do I most value in life?” or “What do I want to be true of me when I come to the last day of my life?”
From these purpose questions, comes the work of sitting down with a calendar and writing out your week. What do you spend your time on? When you have free time, what is your default activity? What decisions do you have to make in order to make what you most value in life a priority? If someone were to say, “My family is my highest priority and value” and then looking at the calendar he is only available to his kids one hour each day or one hour for his wife…in what way is that the most valuable?
“But Matt, I have a job I am working 80 hour weeks.” Perhaps you need to have a heart-to-heart with your family and then your boss. Your decisions have gotten you to the place of your busy-ness. Rather than playing the victim, you can prioritize your life for what’s most valuable. Yes, that may mean you have an uncomfortable conversation with you boss letting her know that you can’t keep up the 80-hour work week because your family, who is the most important, is suffering as a result.
So, the first and most practical way to cultivate your heart is to sit down with a calendar and write out your life. Is it congruent with what you want to be true of you on your death bed? Once you have your time evaluated, then you can do the work of making time for what’s valuable to you. This is the first step because if this isn’t done, then no amount of suggestions that follow in this series will amount to anything if you haven’t made the margin in your life.
Go ahead. Sit down and write. Draw a grid of 7 columns and 6 rows.
A column for every day of the week. A row for every 4 hours of the day. Fill it in and then make the time.
I say “make the time” because anything of value to us will be made time for. Time is not something you collect in a piggy bank. It is something you use to cultivate your values.
In order to hear from God, we must cultivate the heart. To cultivate the heart, you must do the tilling work of evaluating and making time. The Lord speaks to us in the margin. And you’ll want to read subsequent posts because you might be surprised where we go. But, before you read any more…do the work of making margin in your life.
I even put together a nice little .pdf to help you create that margin.