Over the last couple of years, I’ve felt a tugging on my soul to enter a space with greater margins.

Now, knowing that we have a farm with more working animals we can count sometimes, you might think I misunderstand the meaning of the word.

It’s true. We are a busy farm family. We have six large Nubian dairy goats, and at least two (but probably three) of those goats are pregnant. Come February, we could have as many as nine goat kids to care for. We have chickens, more chicks set to hatch and ship to us in the summer, and rabbits, with plans to breed those for meat and to sell as pets.
We have a garden in the spring and summer.
We bake bread, and I make soap and herbal salves and balms.
We homeschool our three kids, and I tutor an English grammar and writing class at our homeschool community.
We are involved in our church, are praying about ministry opportunities, and my hubby has both a civilian job and one with his Guard unit, outside of farm life.

That’s not to pat ourselves on the back or earn accolades. I don’t even tell you these things because I’m looking for validation or for someone to acknowledge the work. It’s not about any of that. I say this to let you know that I understand how things might look from the outside: “This woman does this stuff, and yet here she is telling me to create margins.” The nerve, right?

Right.

From the outside, it might look like we’re overstretched and have too much going on. Sometimes it feels like we do, so I am the first to admit that creating margins in my life is still something I’m learning.

Even so, I’ve got a lot of nerve to tell anyone to take a step back, to rest, to stop doing so much.

But I’m not talking about the physical things that we do. Where my focus is, in this case, is more about the spiritual and emotional margins that we so often forget to breathe life into.

A few years back, you could have seen me jumping from one activity to the next, saying “yes” to anything and everything. Whether it was a field trip, an activity, a volunteer position, a job, helping someone, or even just to walk around the mall with a friend, there was nothing I wouldn’t say “no” to.

I had maxed out my life, and my family members’ lives, to the point where I was so spent from all the doing, running, tending, and stretching, I was spread like too little butter on too much bread. Our lives were full, but they were pushed to the edge with unnecessary stuff. It wasn’t quality; it was about quantity.

My life was a house of cards, and just one sneeze was going to bring the whole thing down.

And it did.

My dad ripped apart the family I’d always known, left us for a different life and family on the other side of the world, and didn’t feel the least bit sorry for it. He wanted a “simple” life. So that left me with the realization that he saw his wife, daughters, son, sons-in-law, grandchildren, and the life he had built as baggage. I was his baggage. I was unsimple. Too much for him to handle. And not enough to make him stay.

I spent the next couple of years pushing down those feelings of inadequacy by throwing myself into
1) denial. “Everything is fine. This is fine. I’m. Fine.”
2) activities. “If we stay busy enough, I won’t have to sit with these emotions and the pain for any amount of time, and I can pretend none of it exists. Everything can just stay the same.”
(Number 2 just really feeds right back into number 1 – deny, deny, deny – doesn’t it?)

“I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine. Everything is fine. My heart hasn’t been ripped from my chest. My life hasn’t been upended. I don’t have daddy issues. Everything is great!” Plaster on the fake smile, wave, and don’t go too deep about anything real, because I was a dam ready to break, and I had to keep it all together so no one would know I couldn’t handle my life.

“Denial” is a river in Egypt, and I was drowning in it.

With every new activity, craft project, volunteer position, job, outing, extracurricular, field trip – you name it – my margins would grow ever closer to one another, and I was running out of room to breathe, the anxiety was tightening its grip around my heart, depression was settling in my mind, and my soul was being starved of the truth it so vitally needed.

I told myself that the more I did, the happier and more fulfilled I’d be. So when reality didn’t meet my expectations, I thought I just needed to try harder. Say “yes” to more things. Do more. Be more. Never say “no” to anything. For a person who gets her worth and value from performance, and then that performance is met with lackluster results, the takeaway isn’t, “Maybe I should do less because this isn’t working;” it’s, “I’m not doing enough. I should do more!”

The vicious cycle continues.

The only way off this merry-go-round from hell was to take a flying leap, hit the ground, scraped and bruised, and let the consequences be what they would be. It was an ugly tumble all the way down.

I’d like to say it happened with grace, after a healthy pause, full of reflection and prayer, followed by a soul-quenching respite. But I’d be lying to you. No.

My fall came when I ended up in the emergency room, having what I believed to be a heart attack.

It was scary, and ultimately embarrassing, because here I was, mid-30s, rushing into the ER, thinking I was dying… when it was really just a panic attack. Granted, a really bad panic attack, with all the classic symptoms of a heart attack. But a panic attack, nonetheless.

I felt ridiculous sitting there, taking up a hospital bed when there could have been someone else who needed it so much more than the handwringing woman who falsely believed she was dying.

But… in a way, I was dying. I was dying inside, chasing all the things that were wrong for me. All these things that were harmful to me. Were they necessarily immoral, unethical, sinful, or evil? No.

On the outside, everything I was chasing seemed good, but on the inside I was miserable. I was worried about a great many things. My mind was never on the task I was doing in the moment. I was present in the body but absent from the spirit of what I was doing and absent in my mind. I was going through the motions of holiness without being holy. I was going through with the actions of a good life without being good or feeling good.

It was all a chore, borne out of obligation and a desire to be accepted. I thought it was what a “good church girl” was supposed to do. It certainly could never be voiced, because then I would sound ungrateful, unthankful, and like I was whining about all the good things I had in my life.

But the anger and exhaustion living inside of me felt anything but good. I was irritable, easily chafed emotionally. I was raw, ugly, and so tired. But what was I supposed to do? So I stayed silent.

And this type of silence is a killer.

A killer of peace.
Of joy.
Of purpose.
Of love.

We stay silent in church for far too long, wrongly believing that if we were to say out loud what we think, feel, and struggle with, no one would get it, because there’s no way anyone else has ever felt that way. There’s no way we’d be accepted because we are the anomaly, and we’d certainly be cast out should we ever open our mouths in honesty.

“I’m the only one” is a lie from the pit of hell – from the father of lies himself – meant to cause shame, division, and to rob us of life-breathing Truth. The truth that Jesus came to save us, to give us new life with purpose, for His glory, for His kingdom.

To live blessed and rooted in His love.

But we can’t have any of that if we believe the lies from the devil, stuck in grief, despair, shame, sin, and the belief that there’s no one who can pull us from any of it.

We have to start getting honest. There’s a song by Matthew West that has these lyrics:

“There’s a sign on the door, says, “Come as you are”, but I doubt it/
‘Cause if we lived like that was true, every Sunday morning pew would be crowded/
But didn’t You say the church should look more like a hospital?/
A safe place for the sick, the sinner, and the scarred, and the prodigals
Like me/

Well, truth be told/
The truth is rarely told/
Oh, am I the only one/

Who says, ‘I’m fine, yeah, I’m fine, oh, I’m fine, hey, I’m fine’, but I’m not/
I’m broken/
And when it’s out of control I say, ‘It’s under control,’ but it’s not/
And you know it/
I don’t know why it’s so hard to admit it/
When being honest is the only way to fix it/
There’s no failure, no fall
There’s no sin You don’t already know/
So let the truth be told”

Hi. My name is Kimi. And I’m a sinner saved by grace. I wrongly believed that a plethora of activities and a lack of boundaries and margins would validate me, fulfill me, prove my value, save me, and heal me. I was wrong. There is only one name under heaven by which we can be saved. And it’s not my name. And it’s not yours.

Do not misread or misunderstand me: I am not saying that church membership, activities, field trips, being a soccer mom, having your kids enrolled in dance, or being involved in a ministry or a volunteer role, or having a job are in any way bad, sinful, wrong, immoral, or evil. I think these things are all good things. All good things that can come from an abundance of life spilling over into good works for the good of others around us.

It really is more about the heart than any one activity or deed, or even lots of activities. It’s not about the activities and the stuff. It’s about the heart.

This realization was the beginning of a sort of death for me. A death of who I was. A death of who I’d always believed myself to be. A death to my ways, my ideologies, my habits, and my busyness. Most of all, my busyness.

Because my busyness was a distraction. It was a band-aid meant to cover the gaping, soul-sized wound I couldn’t heal, and no matter what I stuffed inside the hole to stem the bleeding, it bled all the more.

Something had to give. Which is why I ended up in the ER. Something had to give. And it was me.

There’s another song by Kyndal Inskeep that comes to mind. Some of the lyrics go like this:

“But if I’m bein’ honest, I’m not bein’ honest /
I’ll give you roses just hopin’ you don’t see the weeds in my garden/
If I’m bein’ honest, I’m at my darkest/
I’m sittin’ here waitin’, I’m prayin’ for someone to show me what love is/
I’m just bein’ honest”

We need to get honest about where we are, so we can experience the overwhelming love of Jesus, receive healing, and then use those healed wounds to touch others so they can experience healing, too. “By His wounds, we are healed,” and I think God wants to use our wounded areas to reach hurting people who are hurting in the same way we once hurt. And sometimes still hurt. His grace is sufficient, even when I still hurt, and reaching into the darkness to find another wounded heart means that my pain hasn’t been for nothing.

So… today I can be found wading in slower waters. Choosing instead to sit at the feet of my Savior. A little more like Mary, and a little less like Martha. Her actions and her willingness to serve her Lord wasn’t bad in and of itself, but her sister Mary chose the better thing. It was about her heart, her focus, her attention. Her motivations. It wasn’t laziness. It was intentional rest at the feet of the only One who could refresh her soul.

So that’s why I say “no” more than “yes” these days. When I say yes to something, it means I say no to something else. And I want to give Jesus my best yes and follow Him into the deeper waters where He’s leading me to go.

Learning from Him. Listening to His voice. Letting my roots go deep into abundant streams of Life.

I want my roots to be blessed. And I want yours to be blessed to.

Let’s talk.