Leadership Library Spotlight
by on Feb 5th, 2010 at 2:00 am
Book: Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives, Revised Edition
Author: Richard A. Swenson, M.D.
"A man from Mali, West Africa told me, ‘You Americans have all the watches, but we have all the time." p. 125
One of the guiding principles of the Leadership Library for this site is to provide you with resources that are worth buying and keeping for many years to come. Books come and go, so if you have limited funds (like me), you want to invest your money into books that will prove to be as helpful in 2030 as they are in 2010. Richard Swenson’s book, Margin, ideally suits this principle.
Because I live on a college campus, I often overhear (a.k.a. eavesdrop) conversations from students who share with one another how tired and stressed they are. They’ll inevitably complain about some exam, quiz, project, or absurd homework assignment and then shift to how such work is cutting into the demands of their social life and extra-curricular activities. Now, I have tried to learn a lesson from my uber-patient professors when I was the college student making the same complaints by not saying a word. However, a part of me wants to grab them by the collar, look them in the eye, and say, “You have no idea how easy you have it right now!” Of course, if a forty-year old professor or administrator saw me do this, they would probably be justified in telling me how easy I have it!
Life races. We often find ourselves with too many things to do and too few hours remaining to do all of them. Whether we’re trying to balance school and extra-curricular activities, building career momentum while raising a family, or running an organization while taking care of aging parents and teenagers, life gets busy. If we’re not careful, we can over-exert ourselves and cause great physical, emotional, and spiritual harm.
Richard Swenson knows first-hand the ways in which our hyper-extended lives cause us damage. He has invested the greater part of his career to treating people whose overload hurt their overall health. His book is an urgent appeal to all of us to make the wise, but tough decisions to carve space into our lives for renewal. This space, which should be defended fiercely, is known as “Margin.”
Margin can include financial margin (keeping money in the bank for a rainy day, week, or year), relational margin (time for relationships to heal, thrive, and grow), spiritual margin (solitude and silence for God to speak), or margin in our time (making room to rest, enjoy leisure, and recuperate physically). If we take leadership of our activities and commitments, we can establish these margins and find that even the busiest of times can be a blessing. Without this margin, we’ll burn out and hate what we should love.
If you desire manhood and all of the responsibilities and privileges that it brings to your life, then you will need to master the preservation of margin. A man’s life only picks up steam and burdens as time goes by. Your career flourishes, the demand for your wisdom grows, your family grows, and when the career ends and the kids leave, the demands on your health and the health of your spouse occupies a significant portion of your time, finances, and relational energies. Therefore, this book will prove challenging and beneficial long after its first read.