Margin

When I was doing my final dissertation for my degree, I became aquainted with the rules of academic writing. My degree program used the fifth edition of Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. One of the first rules of academic writing concerns margins. In fact, one of the members of the faculty was reputed to take a ruler out to manually check the margins of the final draft! Margins on paper are important because they create readability and simplicity. The goal is not to cram as much copy into as few number of pages as possible. Words need space to be effective and have an impact.

Margin has the same effect on our lives. We need margin in every area so that we can be effective and have an impact! Are you living life without margin? Or are you living on the edge of the page?

I believe the time has come to learn how to create margin in our lives once again. But how do we simplify? How do we find margin in a world that insists on complexity?

My new series titled Enough is not going to be a series with tons of practical bullet points on how to manage your time or create a budget. There are far better resources available for that than what I can offer. Besides, I think we’re smart enough to realize that our solution is not in a better gadget or a new piece of software.

I do believe it’s important to see what God says about life as he intended. If your life is not rich and satisfying, something is wrong. If your life is not characterized by joy and you’re constantly tormented by worry, something is wrong. Those wrong things cannot be corrected with gadgets and planners. If we will get it right at the foundation, we’ll get it right at the point of execution. In other words, if we’ll believe right things, we’ll behave in right ways.