Margins.

I had the opportunity on Friday evening to attend (via the internet) a leadership conference hosted by Seacoast Church, an extremely innovative multi-site church community based out of South Carolina. The topic was vision, and the main thing that I will take away from that conference was something that Greg Surrat, Seacoast's lead pastor, said in the first 20 minutes or so of the conference.

Greg was talking about how we practically find vision within our own lives, and one of the things he said was, quite simply, if we want a vision from God in our lives, we've got to create a margin. God will never be able to speak to us if we never create the space. It makes sense. But, if I'm honest, while I like to hear from God, I also like to cram 48 hours of stuff into 24 hours of time each day.

If I really want to hear from God, I've got to make a constant effort to have my schedule show that. Even if it's only 20 minutes a day, I've got to give him something.

Lately, I've been using this site called Examen (www.examen.me). You sign up (for free), and then you can choose each day to do a Scripture reading, prayer, or journal time. I personally like the Scripture examens because it asks you to journal on specific questions. It forces me to do more than just read a few paragraphs of Scripture in 20 seconds; I have to think about it and respond. It's not a lot, but it is helping me create at least some day-to-day margin in my life for God to speak to me.

We all want God to speak to us. But that means deciding that is more important than anything else in my life... and that means making my schedule reflect that.