Just for me

More from the 'Deeper Still Conference'.

Kay Arthur was the first to speak on Friday night. She began in Matthew Chapter 1. The intent and purpose of her teaching that evening was to discuss 'Emmanuel- God with us'. Seems pretty clear cut, right? She preached for about 2 hours. It seemed like about 12 minutes. She started at Matthew 1 and went straight through to Matthew 28. It was actually pretty amazing. But I want to tell you what happened about halfway through. She looks up and says "You need to simplify your life. Do you really need more stuff? Do you really need one more thing to sit on a shelf?" I think I may have stopped breathing at that point. It was such a sudden statement. So completely unrelated to her intended topic and so obviously meant for me.

Hear me out on this. I'm sure there were many women at that conference who need to simplify their lives. But I knew that message was for me. I am not an arrogant person but I am fully persuaded that God is crazy in love with me. (He feels the same about you. We've been all through this.) That being said, God also knows that sometimes I am in need of a spiritual sledgehammer begfore I really 'get' what he is trying to say to me. Before the weekend was over, that hammer would fall two more times.

Here's the backstory. In the week prior to the conference, my friend Jen wrote this blog post. I simply could not get it out of my mind. Day after day I just kept thinking about it. Her statement about margins in our lives just rocked my world. I realized basically that I don't have any margins. Not in one single area of my life. Reading Jen's words made me realize how much I wanted them.

Kevin and I talked about it for a couple of days and both of us kept coming back to the fact that the word 'margin' was such a great explanation for what we needed to create. Neither of us had ever heard that word used in that context before. But thinking about that clean, white space around the edge of a piece of paper created a perfect picture for what I needed in my life. The embarrassing part of this story is that during this week leading up to the conference at the same time that I was ruminating on Jen's admonishment to 'simplify', I was in a desperate search for plastic candy canes to decorate my mailbox. Let me tell you something. Nobody NEEDS plastic candy canes on their mailbox. This would be become a pretty good metaphor for how I was wasting my time and treasure.

Back to the conference.

Priscilla Shirer was the first to speak on Saturday morning. The point of her teaching was about having 'an empty quiver'. Basically she was encouraging us to use all we have and trust God to replenish it. She talked about how we all want to keep a little back as a safety net. She was speaking about lots of areas, emotionally, financially, etc. At some point, she says "And you don't have any margins in your life." I don't know what she said after that because I'm pretty sure I lost consciousness for a second. Margins...she actually said margins.

Saturday afternoon, Beth Moore presented her session. She was teaching from Luke. She was talking about several passages where Luke says that Mary 'treasured or pondered' something in her heart. She said that our society doesn't really value that kind of behavior. We don't allow ourselves time to meditate, think, pray, whatever. We just rush through the day hoping to survive. Then she said we don't have any God margins in our life. No place that we set aside to be with Him or think about His Word. You should know,at this point, that I was caught between the ugly cry and hysterical laughter. It wasn't pretty. Then Beth said "It's so funny that Priscilla used the word 'margins' this morning because we don't compare teaching before we present it." I knew it wasn't 'funny' and I also knew it was no coincidence.

So the question I am posing to myself now is this. How messed up is my life that God would compel my four favorite Bible teachers to speak to me about this one specific thing? And how can I possibly fail to respond?