Unhurrying with A Rule of Life: Part 5
Margin & Limits
By Gavin Bennett
Begin with prayer (5 minutes)
Gather together as a Community in a comfortable setting (around a table, on the couch, the floor of a living room, etc.). Have someone lead a prayer asking the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Debrief last week’s Practice in triads (5–10 minutes)
If you are in a Community of seven or more, divide into small groups of 3–4 people each (ideally same gender).
Spend a few minutes catching up on life…
Then talk through the following Debrief Questions:
Were you able to set a time to Sabbath this week? What did that look like?
What was one thing that was new, difficult or freeing about your Sabbath? Was anything surprising to you?
As you consider adding this to your Rule of Life, what are some of the obstacles you may face?
Read this Overview
As we are now well into the idea and Practice of crafting a Rule of Life and working through what one might look like for us, we’ve all probably found ourselves thinking, “But how does this all fit in my life? I don’t have any more room for something else!” If that’s you, you’re not alone. Crafting a Rule of Life takes intention and attention, and that can feel daunting at times. But building a Rule of life does not just mean adding more things; it also means figuring out what needs to be subtracted to make room.
Apprenticeship to Jesus invites us not only to take on countercultural Practices, but to consciously and intentionally take stock of our life and practice editing. Much as has been the heart behind this Practice, the goal is not to get it all right the first time around, but to make space and work slowly towards shaping our life to match the person we want to become. This journey will require us to shift what isn’t working and to try different things until something starts producing the fruit you’re looking for.
As we work to finish our first draft of our Rule of Life, we want to hold in mind the principle of margin. Margin, the space between our load and our limits, is something that many of us aren’t conscious of. But if we ignore it, we burn through it with extra activities and are always on the edge of what feels like burnout or exhaustion. The best way that we can fight this ‘normal’ of a time-obsessive tiredness is by receiving the gift of our own limits and letting them build for us healthy margin. Whether these limits are natural (having a family, needing to sleep, only having 24 hours in a day) or chosen (no phones at the dinner table, Community every Tuesday night, weekly Sabbath), they can help us begin to reclaim our lives from the tyranny of the urgent.
Tonight we will have a conversation about margin and the talk about finishing our first drafts of our Rule of Life for next week.
Rule of Life Workbook
In the Rule of Life Workbook, you will develop a Rule of Life for Body, Relationships, Work & Money, and Gospel & Hospitality.
Remember, though your Rule may read like a list of personal rules, it is more so a means of clarifying and articulating your values and purposefully integrating them into your schedule and lifestyle.
Note: Like the entirety of your Rule of Life, your rule for abiding will be unique to you, and much of the specifics subjective.
Do this Practice as a Community right now (15–20 minutes)
In triads, talk through the following questions.
How well do you maintain margin in your life? Are you better or worse than you were last year?
What currently impacts your inability to maintain margin? What helps you maintain it?
The physician Richard Swenson talks in his book, Margin, about many different kinds of overload. From sample below, which of the following forms of overload feel the most relevant to you right now?
Activity overload
Change overload
Choice overload
Commitment overload
Debt overload
Expectation overload
Information overload
Media overload
Noise overload
Fatigue overload
What’s one limit you struggle to accept?
Imaginative Prayer
Holding in mind your answer to that last question, transition back to a large group and work through the following imaginative prayer activity. (If you have questions on imaginative prayer, you can go back and listen to the imaginative prayer teaching.)
Have everyone get comfortable and then invite the Spirit to speak to you and to silence all the other distractions.
Spend a minute or two in silence, calling to mind the limit in your life that you struggle to accept. As you do, let your mind turn that limit into an object of some kind that you could hold in your hands. It could be anything – a stone, a stuffed animal, an empty cup, a piece of paper, etc.
Next, imagine Jesus walking up to you. What he looks like isn’t particularly important, so don’t get bogged down in getting it ‘perfect’. What he’s like is what we hold onto. As the exact representation of the Father (Hebrews 1v3), we know that Jesus is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love and faithfulness (Exodus 34).
As Jesus approaches, imagine yourself presenting the object – and with it, your limit – to Jesus.
What happens when you hand the object/limit over to Jesus? How does he respond? Perhaps he hands you something in return; maybe he gives you a big hug; maybe he smiles and says something to you. Whatever his response, begin to feel the love of God towards you as you hand this object over.
Spend some more moments in silence together. Then, thank the Spirit for speaking.
There’s no pressure to do so, but invite people to share their experience and the images that did or did not come to mind in that exercise with someone this week. If you have time, it could be helpful to process these experiences back in your triads or as a whole group.
Discuss the Coming Week’s Practice (5–10 minutes)
The Practice for this week is two fold: 1) to take some time to actively engage the idea of margin and limits as it pertains to your life and 2) to finish the first draft of your Rule of Life workbook. Remember, your Rule of Life will be a work in progress, and you will likely adapt it more than once along the way.
Finishing the first draft of your Rule of Life is a big assignment. Do your best to make adequate space this week to work through it. If you need, your Community could decide to do this over the next two weeks. And if you don’t have time to finish the whole thing, that’s ok. This isn’t about getting it done, it’s about taking the next step on our journey towards Jesus. If you feel stressed out or stuck, maybe spend time working on it together with a friend in your Community.
Close in prayer (5 minutes)
