Drawing the Line by Kate Croccoনমুনা

Room for Beauty

In Luke 10, Jesus tells the story of a man lying on the side of a road. A priest and a Levite passed by this man in need at separate times. Rather than stopping to help him, they intentionally ignored him, walked to the other side of the road, and continued on their journeys, so fixated on their destinations.

This story always stings a bit because, like the priest, the Levite, and potentially others who most likely walked right by this man, I can get so fixated on my mission that I don’t allow any margin for magic. Am I the only one? Can you relate?

Rather than turning your computer off to take a ten-minute walk around the block with your husband or a neighborhood friend, you say, “Maybe tomorrow.” Or rather than having a spontaneous coffee date with the bestie you haven’t seen in months, you feel pulled to go home and follow through with your plan to finally deep clean the kitchen.

We pack our lives with so much, leaving very little room for the magic of life. But have you ever been courageous and paused or pushed off what you had hoped to accomplish to relish in the beauty of life with someone you love? Was it worth it, or did you regret it after?

Here’s the truth. When it’s someone important to you, you most likely will not regret it. Or when you know that pausing your plans to do a good deed made a difference in someone else’s life, maybe even the life of a perfect stranger, you probably won’t regret it either. If anything, you might receive a sense of satisfaction witnessing the little negative impact that time spent on what needed to get done. Each time, I am truly amazed at how easily I can shift things or how what I thought was necessary was really unnecessary.

When we allow flexibility in our schedules and with those around us, we can welcome in new freedom and a level of fulfillment we never knew existed.

When have you recently said no to being present with someone because you were focused on a task? What is one thing you could do to create more margin in your life, so you have room for greater spontaneity to be with others?