When was the last time you found yourself daydreaming? You know, the kind of dreaming that you can get lost in? The kind of dreaming that gives you an overarching sense that this would be good…really good?
Can’t remember?
Really? That long?
Of course I don’t know when you last spent a significant amount of time dreaming about what could be, what you wished would be, or even just escaping to a world that no one has ever experienced but you.
My guess, though, is that it’s been a while…
OR
…maybe not!
Of all the things we’ve had to give up in the last year, one thing that most every one of us actually gained is time.
Time.
That space in your life where you don’t have to be somewhere doing something. Beautiful and uninterrupted time.
You may be reading this and thinking that sounds terrible. Who wants time doing nothing? How boring!
However, time is a gift for those who step outside of the box of their busy schedules…at least for those that know how to use it.
Another word we could use for time is “margin”. You don’t want to be daydreaming while you are supposed to be working if you want to keep your job, so you set time aside that doesn’t belong to anything or anyone else. That is called margin. We have time in the margins so we can choose what we do with it.
Most of us don’t have any margin at all. We just happily (or maybe begrudgingly) march on to the tune that someone else is playing for us never stopping to question “is this something good?” The pandemic gave you margin again.
Many of us starting catching up on the projects around the house that have been falling to the wayside because we didn’t have time for them. Some starting eating family meals together and remembered how good they were. Others made drastic life changes by moving to a new city, a new job or took up a new hobby because now that they found margin, they realized life wasn’t all that good in the hamster wheel after all.
Margin has always been crucial for a full life and a happy life. We can’t be complete in our families without margin nor can we grow in our faith (usually) without it. God even told us to stop and just be for a while or, in other words, create some margin…this is where you will here me.
I want to encourage you to stop for a minute (or 10) to daydream. To engage your imagination in a still moment in the margin of your life.
What are you dreaming about? What unattended passion is pulling at your heartstrings? What version of life gets you excited if you just stop to imagine?
I can tell you from my own experience that daydreaming led to Journey and to Sprocket (what I do when I’m not doing Journey).
Protect this margin. Fight for it and don’t let the waning days of a pandemic tempt you to fill up all the space again.
Spend time daydreaming with God or “pray” as I like to think of prayer.
You may find God speaking to you in new and exciting ways!
Before you fill up every free moment that pandemic has provided you, stop, pray, daydream and create margin for you to really grow and experience life fully.
Pastor Mark