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I think Tom and I have become "those" people... you know the ones... those individuals who take leisurely strolls together, sit out at night and stargaze, and always have either a camera or binoculars at the ready to birdwatch.
Just how and when this metamorphosis occurred, I don't exactly know. I think it was as gradual as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
We were sitting out on the deck the other night doing the exact things I just described. I thought about how our lives have changed so since the kids have grown and flown. They are all so busy doing wonderful and productive things, and it's just as it should be. Don't get me wrong. We keep in touch with all of them and visit each other often. That's not the point I'm trying to make.
I guess what I'm really trying to communicate here is that I "get" how crazy, stressed, and hectic their lives can be in this phase, and I feel for them. My goodness, we WERE them! They are raising families, furthering careers, taking grad classes, planting churches, starting businesses, going on mission trips and taking students to youth gatherings. It's hard to have the time to stop, raise your head, and look around at the wonder when you've got bills to pay, kids to feed, sermons to prepare, and papers to write. Again, I'm not saying my kids don't get to do those things, I'm just saying that these middle years are hard, and I wish I could do more for them than to simply encourage and pray... but those are the two best things I can ever do for them.
I suppose I never noticed things like trees, or pink ribbons in the morning sky, or birds, or stars much either before life settled down for us here in the margins.
The margins are where breathing space happens.
If you're old enough, you'll remember having to purchase "blue books" from the college bookstore before exams week. I pretty much dreaded to hear those instructions from a professor, because it always meant we'd be writing essays for the final. Every once in a while you'd hit on a professor who was a stickler about how much you could (or should) write... "Enough to get your point across, enough to substantiate your reasoning... but definitely not a word more. No dribble!"
When time and paper began to run out, I'd write faster, and smaller, encroaching on the margins, writing between the lines, curving words up and along the sides... all in an attempt to finish strong!
I think we do that in life too... encroach on the margins, but the margins are where breathing space happens... and we all need to breathe.
We need to breathe in order to finish strong.
When we were in the years our children are in now, and a bit later, we didn't always do that. I think, somehow, we felt we couldn't, or shouldn't. Long hours coupled with the strains of... well, just life: raising children, watching over aging parents, paying bills, volunteering at church, taking kids to college, prepping for weddings, attending funerals. That became the stuff of life, and though doing all those things were necessary... and proper... and a huge blessing, we were filling the pages of our days to the brim, leaving little to no space for those restful patches of nothing but white.
So here we are now, older, and hopefully wiser. We have come to covet the margins. They give us time and space to hug our grandbabies, to write an encouraging message to one of our kids or to send a card to a friend going through a tough time. The margins give us opportunities to volunteer how, when, and where we feel led. They give us time (intentional time) to pray for the needs of others, and I daresay... even to sit and watch the birds.
Yes, we have entered a phase of life where we find ourselves living in the margins, and in those margins... and everything that word represents... we have found...
ourselves.
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