emotions that dictate

I will never forget the day that a lady from our church called the house to let Brian know that she thought he had lost his spiritual passion! She said that he had not teared up in a while during his messages! Another dear friend accused Brian of not being passionate enough, observing he didn't raise his hands while he was singing. Emotional people often gage their own spirituality and the spirituality of others by their outward emotions. Others wear their emotions all over themselves and subject us all to their roller coaster world. I am learning that true faith is ALLOWING GOD TO BE IN CONTROL OF THE DAY TO DAY WITHOUT EMOTIONAL HIGHS AND LOWS. Remain a steady stream of faith and godliness through the good days and the bad, while allowing God to develop a depth in your life. This Christian life is not a sprint, but rather a distance race. Emotions are a wonderful God-given thing! Just think how boring a football game would be without emotions! How would a romance thrive with no emotion? How could we relate to God without emotions? The key is keeping our emotions from dictating our choices, and not letting our emotions overtake wisdom in our lives. And for our sweet emotional friends that thought Brian was void of passion? They like others, have hopped from church to church looking for the emotional high. May those who come behind us see in us the balance of emotion that Jesus showed us in His life here on earth!

margin

If we had a word of the month, this month's word would probably be MARGIN. What is margin? It is the EXTRA SPACE. When you read a book, there is a margin around each page. If there were no margin, the words would be written up to the very very end of the page, the last letter almost hanging off the end of the paper. All books need a margin; and so do we. We need extra space in our lives to move, to make choices with our time, our finances and our emotions. Too many times I feel like the words of my days are crowding against the edges of the pages in my life, and I find myself with no margin, no room to breathe.

So how can I create margin in my life, and how can I make time for relationships that I value the most? I am learning that in order to re-customize the typeset for my life's pages, I need to allocate some empty space for nothing. I can value peace by not overcommitting. Oftentimes, by going to bed earlier, we can find more margin in the beginning of our day. Dr Richard Swenson, in his book, Margin, speaks of the epidemic of stress and suggests that we can find margin in contentment, simplicity, balance and rest.

I used to pride myself in the fact that all of my words were written on all of my pages to the very end with no margin. Now, I am keenly aware that I want my life to be more than one crowded article. I want it to be a volume of well-written depth with MARGIN.