The Beauty and Necessity of Margins

Nikos Koutoulas via Compfight

Bev Murrill wrote a piece over on the She Loves blog about how we live with money based on a story from the Book of Ruth. Do you live on the very edge of your earnings? For some of us we are just scraping by, barely able to put food on the table: this article is not directed at you. But for many of us, we’re living with no financial margin as a result of choices we’ve made. Is there any financial margin in your life? Could there be? I hope you’ll check out the entire article here.

Excerpts from Bev’s post:

So many of us are in overload as far as our cost of living is concerned. We have many, many needs, and those needs cost money. We need that awesome car that will make heads turn. We need a house to suit our status. Our holidays become more exotic and expensive with every salary rise. Our credit cards are maxed out and we can only just manage to pay the interest. We live to the limits of our budget, the very edges of our fields. And then we grieve because we see real and desperate needs—the deep, grinding poverty of the world around us—and we turn away and sigh, or cry or walk on by because we have no way of helping. We’ve stripped our vineyards bare.

God doesn’t require us to be poor in order to please Him. He gets no glory or pleasure in His people being impoverished, but we are such extreme creatures that we legalistically veer erratically from one side of the Christian perspective on finances to the other. For many people, it’s either a feast or a famine. We think we should have nothing or everything, but that’s not what God is saying. He wants to bless us above and beyond our immediate needs, but He doesn’t want us to use all that blessing up on ourselves and our own stuff.