"Margin, Availability and Contentment "
Pastor Bill Chadwick
November 8, 2009
Oak Grove Presbyterian Church
Leviticus 19:1-4, 9-14 Philippians 4:11a-13
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien…” Leviticus 19:9-10.
That is lousy farming. But lovely living.
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.” Jewish law forbade the farmers or vineyard owners from going back and picking a second time. What was missed the first time was for the poor and the alien to glean. Gleaning is what Ruth was doing in the Biblical book of the same name when she met her future husband Boaz. She, as a widow without financial means, was gleaning in Boaz’s field.
The gleanings were for the poor and coincidentally, the wildlife. Before the last half century or so US farms had fence rows and sloughs. But around 1960 farmers began to farm every square inch of their property, which is good for the short-term bottom line. The pheasant and duck populations declined precipitously, along with all other wildlife in rural areas.
I’m not picking on the farmers. (I mean, Cal was at the first service!) (Cal is my brother and a retired farmer.) They were and are simply trying to maximize profits, which most of us do. I am using this as a parable of life without margin.
We are overloaded these days, most of us.
In contrast to biblical times we try to squeeze every ounce of production out of the land and waters; most of us cram every waking moment with frenetic activity; and we spend every penny we earn and then some. Our lives are without margin and we pay a price physically. We pay a price emotionally. We pay a price in our personal relationships and in our relationship to God. And that is the definition of sin.
We are overloaded: Communication overload: email on our Blackberries. We’re never away from our work….Information overload.
Choice overload. (Geezer alert!) When I was a kid in Bloomington I used to bike up to Oxboro Theater at 97th and Lyndale. A Cineplex. (Not!) One screen. And there were four and a half channels on TV. Channel 2 didn’t come in very well and had nothing a kid wanted to watch in those days. Now there are hundreds of TV channels, thousands of movies in the video store or on demand. Choice overload: How many products at Cub Foods or Home Depot to choose from? Or on the Internet?
Debt overload.
Noise overload. Planes, trains and automobiles. iPods.
Work overload, People overload, Traffic overload, Perhaps Ministry overload…
And the rate of change. Recently I heard that something like half of the things ever invented in the two and a half million-year history of the human race have been invented in the last 35 years! Rate of change! On and on…
The source for much of this sermon is Dr. Richard Swenson, a physician and man of faith, who has written a wonderful book entitled: Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives. I would highly recommend it or its follow-up volume entitled The Overload Syndrome, which offers more practical tools for putting some margin back in our lives. Either would be a good book for adult ed or for small groups.
There are several areas in which most of us these days live with very little margin. But today I wish to focus solely on the subject of time. I offer myself as an example of the problem more than the solution.
What’s your favorite holiday? (Show of hands for different holidays.)
Mine is Thanksgiving. Why? Yes, it’s my favorite meal of the year. Yet the biggest reason I love Thanksgiving is the pace. No lights to put up, no presents to buy and wrap, no cards, no pageants—each of which I love individually, it’s the sum total that overwhelms me and turns me into Scrooge. I like the “no hoopla” aspect of Thanksgiving. I get three or four days off and I do NOT go shopping the day after Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t hit those crowded stores if the merchandise were free.
Now, what I am about to say is not bragging, it’s not looking for sympathy nor applause, it’s a confession of sin. Most weeks over the past few months I’ve worked six or seven days per week. My theory is to work five days and be off two days. But that almost never happens, but that’s just life for a pastor in the first six months of a new call.
I constantly have this feeling that life would be darn near perfect if I could just have one more day per week to work AND one more day per week to relax.
How to do that? There’s only one way: nine-day weeks.
I’m serious. Follow this now. Nine-day weeks. Six to work, three off. Four weeks EXACTLY per month. So if the 8th is a Sunday this month then the 8th of next month will also be a Sunday. Ten 36-day months. That, of course, comes to 360 days. Leaving us five bonus days—I say we put them in the summer. Holidays for most people, double-time for police officers, nurses and the like who need to work. But the big draw is this: weekly meetings (and sermons) would only come around every nine days. Monthly meetings would only come around every 36 days. Can I get an “Amen” here?!
I shared my plan for a nine-day week with my mother once and her immediate reaction was “If you thought up this crazy idea you already have too much time on your hands.” Just what they said to the Wright Brothers.
Well, I’m not going to put a lot of energy into it. But I do feel it is helpful for us, especially prior to Advent, to think about margins in relation to time.
And, as always, I’m primarily preaching to myself, because we’re not very good at this at our house. A few days ago one of our children was begging to be allowed to do something on Thursday evening. This was the Sunday before. As Kris and I looked at her schedule we found that Thursday was the one evening out of seven consecutive she didn’t already have something scheduled. We said no, to her great disappointment, but we recognized that we had already allowed things to get out of hand. One year in our family we had two kids playing traveling basketball the same season. A demonic schedule: each had a tournament every other weekend with games Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Until a few years ago in our society at least sports and school events weren’t scheduled Wednesday evenings and certainly not Sundays or AT LEAST not Sunday mornings. But that’s gone. I don’t care if you’re Christian or not, to have a week with no margin is sick, and makes us sick.
In 2000 a group of frazzled parents in Wayzata made national headlines when they called for a community-wide “time out” to the incessant demands of their children’s extracurricular activities….Trying to figure out a way to slow down their lives, the parents formed an organization called "Putting Family First." They also created a "seal of approval" to be awarded to extracurricular organizations -- football leagues, school bands, etc. -- that agreed to structure activities so families could spend more time together. Two of their leaders, Bill Doherty and Barbara Carlson, wrote a book called Putting Family First, offering practical suggestions.
The first step is for families to make one change in their schedule. Some people may make a big change -- taking a summer-long sabbatical from all organized activities, for example. Others may start small by creating one special family night a week when outside activities are not allowed. (By Karen MacPherson, Post-Gazette National Bureau Monday, August 19, 2002)
We did that at our house about 2001—family night almost every Sunday evening. The kids constantly complain, but it is the right thing to do and I am sure they will be wonderful memories for all of us.
One of the reasons I have so little margin in my life is because I usually try to get one more thing done. If I have a meeting across town, say a 15-minute drive, when there are 20 minutes to go before it starts I try to squeeze in ONE more thing. Invariably I can’t slip out the door without someone needing something and I end up leaving 14 minutes before the meeting starts and I’m all stressed.
I am a little better at this than I used to be because of what I learned from a former parishioner, a woman who had struggled mightily with anxiety, to the point of having been hospitalized a couple of times. She told me that she always aimed to be early for appointments. If it was fifteen minutes away she would leave a half an hour before. Her memorable line: “I’d rather be a little early than a little stressed.”
Two stories: When I lived in Bayport I planted a little flowering crabapple tree on the boulevard in front of my house. The first few years it grew nicely. One day on the radio I heard a segment on the need for pruning trees. I thought that maybe that apple tree was big enough now to need pruning, so I called my friend Harold, a master gardener and quizzed him about pruning. Harold told me all the tips about which branches to cut off and he told me the mantra of Master Gardeners regarding pruning: “If in doubt, cut it out.”
So I went out and pruned. And pruned. Stepped back. Found a few more branches to cut. There was a big pile of branches at the trunk of the tree. I hauled those out to the back yard and was pleased with my first-ever pruning job.
Now I never asked Harold to come over and do the pruning so I was a bit surprised when his pickup pulled up in front of my house the next day. I went out to greet him. Harold got out of his truck, looked up at the crabapple tree and said, “Is this the tree that needs pruning?”
“Well, it’s the tree that did need pruning.”
“Hungh!” Harold grunted in contempt. He pulled his big loppers out of the box of the pickup and began to hack away. Snip. Snip. Snip. Step back and look. Snip. Snip. Snip. Step back and look. Snip. Snip. Snip. I watched in horror as the mound of branches grew and grew. I actually was wondering if Harold was starting to lose it. Finally, he stopped. I was absolutely sick to my stomach. I really loved that tree and I was sure that if it survived at all, which I highly doubted, it would take years to recover.
Well, guess what that little crabapple tree looked like in a couple months? Wow! I became a great believer in pruning. And it became a parable for me in my attempts to schedule my life. Pruning leads to more abundance.
Second story. A number of years Princeton University conducted a very interesting study. They contracted with a number of students to perform a study, but they didn’t tell the students what the study was about. First, the divided the students in half and one half was read the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the story about the injured man alongside the road, two travelers passed him by and the third stopped to help. The other half of the students were not read the parable.
Then they divided all the students—both those who had heard the story and those who had not—into three groups. Individuals from each group were told that the next part of the study was being held in a building across campus, about a fifteen-minute walk away. One third of the students were told that they had plenty of time to get there, about an hour. One third of them were told they had exactly fifteen minutes to get there. One third of them were told they were already late. Meanwhile, the project leaders had stationed an actor along the route to the next building who was made up to look like and who acted as if he were seriously injured. The study showed that whether or not a student had just heard the story of the Good Samaritan made NO difference as to the likelihood he or she would stop and help. What made the difference was how much time they had before the next appointment. Most of the students with plenty of time to spare stopped and helped. A few who had just enough time stopped. Almost no one from the group told they were already late stopped to help.
Margin is not a spiritual necessity, but availability is. The ones who had margins in their lives were the ones who were faithful. Amen. |
