I’m Busy, How About You?

Posted on September 21, 2009 
Filed Under Marriage, Parenting, Personal, Spiritual Life

Five kids at home means five potential activities or events, at five different times, in five different directions. It means a very, very busy wife who seems to live in the van, eats every meal on the run, gets up before everyone else in the home, is glued to the computer screen, is buried under medical receipts and invoices. Dad attending to house and yard work, cars needing service and repair, appliances that are dying, piles of financial paperwork.

The Fuller household is busy! And “busy” is an understatement. At times we just know the wheels are going to come off, that we’ll hit a wall and collapse, that somehow we’re going to miss something very important…we just don’t know what or where. We are needing some margin in life right now, but not going to get it anytime soon. Can you relate?

Enter a concept called,”margin.” Dr. Richard Swenson’s premise is that in our modern culture we have pushed life too fast and too hard, that we have too much going on. We’ve overloaded and paying a price. His analogy is the written page. Consider a book – or even a computer display. Fatigue sets in if you try to read a book which has type running across the entire page. It takes effort to sort through all the text. It drains us to try to decipher that much information.

Dr. Swenson suggests that is what we do with life. We cram activity into every nook and cranny of life. We lack “margin,” and there is a price to be paid for that. Get the book, read it and try to apply the principles. You’ll be glad you did.

And if you think you’re busy, check out this article WSJ article about the Duggars, who are expecting child #19.  Yikes! Can you imagine what it is like to manage that household? How much driving around there is? Frankly, I’m really grateful that the writer thinks highly of this incredible family, and that there’s admiration and gratitude, not a condescending attitude about having so many children.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Comments are moderated and will not appear on johnfullerblog.com until they've been approved. While we are eager to facilitate conversation by publishing most comments, we may withhold one from time to time if we deem it offensive, vulgar, overly personal, cynical, disrespectful, irrelevant, redundant or unnecessarily contentious.
Comments on John Fuller's blog may not refer specifically to any current electoral candidate, or any measure on a current ballot – at any level of local, state, or federal government. Focus on the Family is a non-profit 501(c)(3) entity, and therefore cannot take a position on specific votes. Nor can we display any such statements on our Web sites. Likewise, we cannot discuss here the personal viewpoints of people like Dr. Dobson or Jim Daly on political candidates or ballot measures. Any posts to this forum which violate these rules will be removed. There is an alternative venue for this type of discussion. Some activities of this nature are undertaken by Focus on the Family Action, a 501(c)(4) organization, and its media outlet, Citizenlink.
Finally, if you would like to contact our ministry directly, please feel free to do so from one of our FAQs.