Our lives are so busy and fast-paced that it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important. Is your life crazy busy? Is your schedule jam packed?

I recently listened to a series by Andy Stanley called “Breathing Room” and wow could I relate. Not having breathing room in my life almost cost me everything.

I was addicted to a high paced lifestyle. I always looked for my value, my self-worth, and my identity with position and success — selling my soul to my work.

Check out this excerpt from my book Heartstone:

My kids would call me at work and ask me if I could come to one of their events, and I always responded with an excuse, telling them that my work was really important. I would get calls from my wife wondering if I would be home to eat dinner with the family or hoping that I wouldn’t be working late again. My weekends were wasted as I spent more time in the office giving more of myself to the taskmasters. I would find more and more to do to feed on the empty acceptance which never seemed to satisfy. Business trips required me to start traveling internationally, and I would always choose to travel alone without any thought of inviting my family. I would come home from a late night at the office and selfishly choose a silent retreat right into the home office to continue my work, further isolating my wife and kids. What I didn’t see was the contempt that began to take root between my wife and me. My family was slowly slipping away, and I was letting it.

Acting from a self-authored script on my own stage of life, I foolishly performed to the audience of this world, only seeing Jesus as a supplement to the playbill.

Let me frame this up a bit. I was a Vice President in a global billion dollar organization. I played on the world stage, my schedule was always filled to capacity, I was always travelling to different countries, the kids were always involved in activity after activity and everyone was always moving in a hundred different directions. If I were honest with myself at the time, life became a drag! All the professional exposure, all the lifestyle perks, all the opportunities the kids had, all the financial stability – none of it mattered in the end because it all distracted from what is really important. Relationship.

I am not saying that these things are bad, but there was no breathing room or margin in my life and the family suffered.

At some point we have a collision with our limits and things will implode. In our attempt to gain the most out of life we loose control of it. We trade our peace in for progress and prosperity. Through the lens of the world, I made great progress and lived in prosperity but had no peace whatsoever. I drove everyone around me crazy and destroyed so many relationships along the way.

I would continue to perform on the world stage desperately trying to gain my identity. Ignoring the inner sadness slowly tightening around me, I didn’t realize that underneath this drive was a deep desire to just be accepted. I became a slave to my own empire, running without a purpose, and I didn’t even know it.

Yes my identity was misguided. Yes I was running without a purpose. Yes I had a deep desire to be accepted. Here is the rub, underneath all of this was I thought I could do this on my own with out God. Because I didn’t trust Him, because of the underlying fear, I convinced myself that I could do better. Imagine that? Overtime the pace became unsustainable, my faith eroded, my peace was gone, my stress was off the charts and my relationships suffered.

There is a connection between our willingness to create margin and our faith. Its a faith issue!

Does God have anything to say about this lack of margin in our lives? Yup!

For starters, God built in margin into the pace His people were to live. Its called the Sabbath and its one of His top ten commandments! But we don’t and we convince ourselves that there is so much to be done.

When Jesus shows up He shares this from Matthew 6:31–34. “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

We have read this time and time again, but we think it doesn’t work in our life. Not saying that there is anything wrong with working hard, setting goals or progress; but when our desire to control eclipses our faith, its a matter of time before we find ourselves find ourselves redlining.

We weren’t created for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was created for the us. In this place of Sabbath, God is asking us to trust Him. He modeled out the importance of having this space and He is calling us to build this space into our lives by trusting Him.

In order to live a life of faith, there has to be a sustainable pace. There has to be breathing room, there has to be margin.

Look, God knows what your going through. God knows what you need. God knows you want whats best for your kids. God knows the pressures you have at work. He knows!

What if we chose to trust God and really believed that God knows this stuff? What would happen to our fear? What would happen if we knew our limits? Again, what if we really believed God at His word?

God is inviting all of us to a different pace of life. Someone or something will determine your limits. You will either let fear and culture drive you to your limits or you will learn to walk in accordance to the pace God has set for your life.

So what’s it gonna be? Are you going to keep your foot on the gas and continue to reline or is it time to let your foot off the gas and slow down some.

Are you ready to build some margin into your life?

Where do you need some margin in your life?

What is one thing you can do this week to begin to create it?