Margin

When we were first making a plan for the sabbatical, the goal was to travel as much as possible.  We love to travel--especially with our family.  We like being able to see places on TV and say to one another, "Remember when we were there?"    We also like the experience of trying to navigate a new space.  So we hoped to get in as much travel as possible and so we had planned to see as much of Europe as possible in a whirlwind tour. 

But as we listened to the instruction about planning a sabbatical, we were counselled to develop a rhythm about coming and going.  There should be time away followed by time to return and recover.  Like using a muscle, there should be stress and release in order to grow.  The last thing you want is to return from a time of "recovery" and be exhausted!  In order for the time away to be fruitful, it's important to gear up for it and recover from it.

We discovered that firsthand this week.  We planned several days between our time away at the lake and our European trip to just be at home, to rest, and to make preparations for our biggest experience in the sabbatical--taking our entire family on a month long tour across Italy.  Because of that planned "inactivity," we didn't have to worry during our last experience about getting ready for the next.  We found this down time to be extremely helpful so that we could make all the arrangements for the house, the pets, and to get rested up and packed up.  We have another period of rest planned for when we return (except Madi who leaves on a mission trip to Costa Rica the day we return!).

Richard Swenson wrote a classic book several years ago called Margin, in which he talks about our need for meaningful gaps in our lives in which we prepare for and recover from the stuff we do in life.  He describes margin as "the space between ourselves and our limits."  He says that the goal of our modern era is to get more and more, faster and faster.  But while this not a limit to the new things that can be thrust upon us, there is a limit to what we can handle physically.  We are also limited by time.  And so as our modern world increases its ability to move us quickly from one event to the next, we are losing those natural times of recovery that were built into life a generation ago.  Most people are at a breaking point.  So, Swenson says, instead of keeping the speedometer needle buried until they crash, people should deliberately build idle time into their lives to reconnect with God and rest.  That's call "margin." 

And that has helped us this week.  If we had followed through with the original sabbatical plan of uninterrupted travel, not only would we not have been approved for the grant, but we'd likely return in worse shape than we started.  We are going into this extended time away feeling refreshed and will have time when we return to process all of what we will experience.    Margin.