the rule of margins
Kevin and I have curiously studied the rule of margins for years, have even developed a lingo for our real-life observations that, where little margin exists, something will always come along to take up even the tiniest bit that remains.
Ask me if I feel squeezed, especially this time of year, and if, in the years since we’ve begun to verify this rule, I have learned to apply it carefully to the way I allocate my own time, and I will tell you that for all of life, I am a work in progress.
The rule of margins has not been without its practical applications, though. In fact, just this morning as Kevin and I sprint up a windblown hill along a stretch of road we semi-affectionately call the runway—runway, not because it’s the way where we run, though that’s true, but because drivers accelerate downhill and around its curves as if preparing to take off on wings into the air, as we push our thighs—gogogo—up and also around the heaping pile of brown and curling leaves a neighbor has so diligently blown off their lawn into the street, because of the rule of margins always in play, we anticipate that at the same moment, exactly this one, two cars will suddenly hurtle by on opposite sides of the street. Regardless of whether we can actually hear those approaching cars coming, or what conversation goes on between us as we hoof it up the hill, the moment we notice the leaves, we instinctively move as far over to the left as we can, until the tumble-down edges of that pile crackle underfoot and we slide into a single-file line at the edge of the road.
Where little margin exists, something will always come along to take up even the tiniest bit that remains, and it’s interesting also to note some correlation between the law of margins and our chronic hurry, as the two seem to go hand in hand. We have been sprinting; the cars hurtle by, and we needed no fancy formula to predict that at the exact moment when we will have the least breathing room, circumstances will collaborate to eliminate what little room we thought we had. Inevitably, we pilgrims will find ourselves hard-pressed.
Margin! Kevin and I always call that word to each other in these moments, grinning wider than space allows because it happens this way every time, and it is our real-time experience of a truth that resonates deep within our bones about what it means to live here, that, as Paul wrote it, we are, in this crazy broken-down world, often hard-pressed on every side, and the greater the pressure we feel, the less also the space for living. Paul used a great Greek word to express this in scripture, thlibo, which in pronunciation sounds like constricting events feel (for it happens on every side, not just one), thlee-bo, when we believe ourselves to be sprinting along a generously wide road and then suddenly find ourselves, despite our best laid plans, circumstantially oppressed by crowding threats. The threats constricting me do not, of course, compare to the threats that oppressed Paul and the Corinthian church, but I feel the difficulty of them all the same.
The cars whiz past, and Kevin and I fall into a jog beside each other after the sprint interval ends and ‘the runway’ unclogs, simultaneously talking to drivers long gone (me more than Kevin)—heaven forbid you should maybe slow down for a beat in light of the situation, shaking our heads as we glance toward each other, because I’m telling you: always.
Ask me what I try to do when life feels threateningly hemmed in and I am feeling with a groan the narrowness of the way, and I will tell you that no, it still somehow doesn’t occur to me either that slowing down a beat just might be the safest thing for me and everyone around me.
I am beginning finally to hear that comment rising though, to attend to it while I’m jogging beside Kevin talking to drivers who have long since passed and who can’t hear me anyway, that maybe my thoughts for them should be an application I make to myself. At the same time, I’m realizing that slowing down isn’t just important for me because it facilitates some change in my external circumstances.
It’s the rule of margins, the hard-pressing facts of life in this broken world, that makes me love Psalm 18, especially verse 19, when after David describes what he’s suffered out in the wilderness on the run—entanglements and destructive torrents, the suffocating, tight-wrapped coils of the grave and confrontations with entrapping death—he writes about the faithful deliverance of God, who, as David put it, brought him out to a spacious place. This is the language of rescue, of God’s freedom for captive people, that employs oppressive, cramping words to describe our spiritual slavery and juxtaposes these with broad, wide-open words when describing our liberation.
Paul, continuing his thoughts in his second New Testament letter to the wild Corinthian church writes, “we are hard-pressed on every side but not crushed,” emphasizing that even while external forces will always apply pressure from without (thlibó), in other words, the law of margins applies, those in Christ cannot be “made narrow” within (stenochóreó), because our eternal freedom makes an uncrushable spacious place of our hearts. But I need the slowing of routine Sabbath ceasing to keep turning my easily distracted eyes from those loud external forces constantly threatening oppression and to keep relocating my primary residence in the broad pasturelands of my union with Christ.
What am I thinking now, as I jog along beside Kevin, anticipating again the rule of margins coming into play on the run, except that in light of all the important things on my to do list between now and Christmas, which seems to be coming so very quickly, perhaps I should allocate some of the time I usually set aside for the intentional wonder of Sabbath to get things done?
It’s a trick, a nasty temptation, the crazy idea that I should ever allow the hard-pressing of mortal life as it will always be to tempt me away from lingering in the free and spacious places where I make my home with God, that I should ever believe I just don’t have the time or space to stop attending to all the external pressure in order to practice the reality of my freedom. Call it a breathing exercise, this slowing, for it diffuses the anxiety inevitably produced by all that hard-pressing, and anyway, since God is my breath, to allow that any external pressure should keep me from slowing to draw my life from Him is not to be suffocated by constricting circumstances that have no such power over me but rather to believe the lie that I am dying simply because I refuse to inhale.
For a while now, Kevin and I have observed that no amount of careful preparation can outwit the rule of margins, which is not at all to disregard considerations of human limitation and healthy strategies aimed at preserving resources, but rather to reassert the still more critical liberation of our souls, the spacious freedom only God creates and maintains that will be the difference within us.
Until we leave the runway, one and only one caveat to the rule of margins remains, and that is the reign of God.
