Fourth Week of Advent - LOVE. Vol.1 Ch.4

Human love is fickle. Advent love is margin love.

Don't get me wrong. I love loving and being loved in the human form. I have dreamed of being humanly loved for longer than lots people even experience love.  I dreamed of love until I married my first husband in 1977 and then after our divorce in 1990 I dreamed of love again until 2015. That was when I married this wonderful man and we began a life long journey into loving each other.

But I know that human love is fickle. I'm not afraid of my husband leaving me. Marriage is a commitment, and I know he is the kind of man to be stalwart in commitment. I myself am committed to our marriage and to him. But human love is fickle. 

My children love me. I know that they love me. I never question that love. But that love is fickle. Sometimes that love gives me its best and sometimes it doesn't. Does that mean that my children do not love me. Heavens no. 

But Advent LOVE is Margin Love. 

Now don't read that Marginal Love. It is not Marginal love. It is Margin Love.   

What is Margin Love? I honestly have never heard the term before. I made it up. It formed from thoughts that wove together over time. It is not a new idea, just a little nickname I use.

So again, I ask. What is Margin Love? This is the love I like to view as Love that always has enough and most of the time aplenty.    

When I discovered 'margin living' back in 2003, I had been investigating the words wait, simplify, stillness, and listen for some time. I read a book by Richard A. Swenson, MD entitled Minute of Margin.

This devotional book lead me to question how to create margin in my life. Here I was, a single-mother preparing for the empty nest. Believe me when I tell you, as a single parent that one can be ever so frightening. I realized I had kept so busy with 'life' and 'living' that there was not room for either real life or real living. I was involved in my children's worlds as well as my own.

The concept of margin was transformational. Living a life planning white space into the calendar.

Plan some margin into your day to be still? Plan some margin into your day to be quiet and listen?  We are so busy, running so fast we fail to be still and enjoy the moments that are passing.

I had entered into stillness and silent retreats, but to enter into these on a daily basis - to actually put them down on my calendar? Well, this had totally escaped me. A planned time to allow for interruptions, to breathe both in and out, to enter into moments that could not and would not be seen had I not had margins sectioned in my calendar.

That is what I mean when I coined the phrase: Advent LOVE is Margin Love.

Margin Love is planned love. God planned from the beginning of time to solve the SIN problem that had separated Man from Him by writing Advent Love on the calendar of time.

He had a selected young woman: Mary and a young man: Joseph. The test would be in the decision each would make. Would they follow through with the plan? And as is the mystery of God, He knew they would even though He did not manipulate them.

Jesus Christ came as a baby brought to us in a Margin Love, a planned love. An intended window open into the heavenlies. A  passing of Him, into this earthly space and entering time.

This new baby Jesus was an Advent LOVE Offering of sacrifice and redemption.  A Margin Love from his birth to his crucifixion. By accepting Him as our Savior we remove the time parameters and enter the Advent LOVE of Margin Love and are enveloped in the amazing mystery of the eternal Love.  That love that is outside of Time and Space. God's love that is never too little nor too much, but always enough.

Outside of time God took a spot, a beginning and an end,  this Margin of Space and Time. He set it as the time that Jesus Christ, His son, would enter, live his human life in total dependence upon the Holy Spirit, and exit carrying the SIN of all humanity upon himself. In this Margin Love, He gave Himself up as our path/way into the Holy of Holies. 

God, the triune 3 in 1 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made clear this Margin Love is never fickle, and always enough. In fact, this Margin Love is aplenty!

Because He is the I am, i am
robyn rochelle cox

May this Christmas Season bring many blessings of Margin Love.
and May you celebrate in the ENOUGH of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in One.

Robyn Rochelle & Biff Cox
RR&BC, LLC©
All writings are protected under copyright laws. Contact the author or link to this page or website if you use or reference.