getting squeezed

We have some awesome volunteers at The Community Fellowship and The Community Dream Center. One such guy we recently met is a gifted artist plus he loves to talk and talk and talk. As he and I were talking about the sermon series I am preaching on MARGIN, he showed me a couple of things he had drawn.

He had taken the artwork for the series and run some pieces of it together. When you took a hard look at it, some of the words ran together. The letters needed margin as they were squeezed together and running off the page.

Our lives are like that. We squeeze as much as possible into our lives and end up with nothing to give or share or even no time to rest. My life like many of yours could use a good dose of margin. We need margin in the way we look at things, the way we deal with people and in the resources we have.

Matthew 11:28 NLT

Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

Psalm 23:2 NLT

He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams.

I often feel squeezed. Too often I allow myself to get so busy that I am really squeezed into not having the ability to rest, but that is not God’s best for me. In the last month God has used several occasions, including today, to remind me that His desire is for me to have margin in my life and for you to have margin in your life.

Margin means we have the ability to do more. Margin takes saying no to many good things so we can say yes to the best things. Getting margin in our lives is not easy. It is a hard choice or a series or hard choices. When we are getting squeezed, it is time to choose to have some margin.

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Michael Harrison's e-devotion

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