Fuel

“To him who believes all things are possible.” Mark 9:23

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu felt called to ministry as a young girl and went through ministerial training in Ireland and India. When she graduated from her training her heart was “on fire” with a burning passion to serve God and love people. One day she approached her superiors and announced, “I have three pennies and a dream from God to build an orphanage.”

Her superiors could not believe what they were hearing! After laughing at her, they said, “You can’t build an orphanage with three pennies. With three pennies you can’t do anything.” Agnes just smiled and replied, “I know. But with God and three pennies I can do anything!”

For fifty years this woman worked among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. We know Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu as Mother Teresa who endeared herself to thousands of people. She literally gave her life away in sacrificial love to others. Mother Teresa did not have the “material” things that many have today, but she had a passion, which gave her life meaning and direction. The impact of her love and kindness impacted millions around the world!

She only had 3 pennies and a dream that burned in her heart. That was enough! She felt the hand of God was upon her life and He would open up the way, and provide all she needed. Negative voices, or meager resources could not deter her. She would instead place the dream, and the passion, in the hands of God and let Him work things out for His glory. We can learn from that. Let God be God! Trust Him to be your provider, your guide, and your strength. Let Him work out the dreams that He has placed in your heart. He knows what’s best! He knows how to bring it about!

Are you struggling to find margin in your life?

Let me rephrase that: Are you struggling to find passion, creativity, and spiritual clarity in your life?

In his book Anam Cara, John O’Donohue tells a story about a European explorer in Africa who hired some native Africans to help carry his equipment through the jungle. They didn’t stop for three days. At the end of the third day, the hired hands stopped and refused to move on. The explorer asked why, and one of the African natives said, “We have moved too quickly to reach here, now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us.”

When you don’t have margin in your life, everything else suffers. It is hurried complexity that takes the life out of life. And yet it is the simplicity of abiding in Christ that puts the life back into life (John 15:1-11).

“Recovery of the Sabbath is the most crucial and most demanding covenant command (spiritual discipline) now to be faced in the technological society.” -Walter Brueggemann

God fills the empty spaces. Having margin in our lives brings renewed passion, creativity, clarity, and purpose.

That’s why God commanded us to take a Sabbath. The word Sabbath means “to rest from labor” and “to catch one’s breath.”

Are you struggling to find passion, creativity, clarity, and orientation of purpose? It may be time to slow down and carve out some margin in your life. It’s time to let your spirit “catch up” to you. That may mean taking a break from social media, internet, and technology.

In addition to practicing a weekly Sabbath day, we need to discover how to continually rest in Sabbath-moments by taking spiritual breaks a few minutes each day. By keeping the discipline of a Sabbath we can have our passions renewed and reoriented with Christ, a deep inner tranquility sustained by union with God and intimacy in prayer.

We need pauses… we need margin… we need renewed spirits. We don’t get that renewed passion by violating the covenant command to find rest. Find it, or burnout. There’s not another option.