Margin is the space between two things.

Think about driving down the interstate. Margin is the space you leave between your car and the car in front of you. That space gives you room to react if something unexpected happens.

In personal finances, margin is what you have left after you have paid all your obligations. It is the cushion between what you earn and what you spend. It is the spread, the gap—the margin.

The concept of margin can apply to almost every area of our lives.

Let’s say you are a runner who is capable of running 10 miles, but today you take it easy and run only 5. You had the ability to run another 5 miles, but you chose not to use everything you had. That unused capacity is margin.

You may be asking, “Keith, what are you talking about?”

I’m talking about finances, work, time, health, relationships, and almost every other area of life.

Too often, we stretch ourselves right to the limit. We fill every minute of our schedules. We take on as much debt as we can afford. We accept more work than we can reasonably handle. Sometimes we even push our bodies and health to the breaking point.

There is something worth noticing in the story of creation. God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. God certainly did not rest because He was exhausted. The seventh day established a rhythm of rest. You might say the seventh day was margin.

Hopefully, you are not living at the very edge of everything you can handle.

Leave some margin between your workload and your life. After you pay your financial obligations, try to leave something over as a cushion. In your relationships, leave enough time to truly be present with your family rather than simply fitting them into an already crowded schedule.

Don’t live every day at the absolute limit of your time, energy, finances, or strength. Leave some room to breathe. Leave room for the unexpected. Leave room to enjoy the people God has placed in your life.

And most importantly, leave some margin in your schedule to spend time with the Creator of the universe. After all, He is the One who created you, and He knows better than anyone how much you can handle.

Some of the best moments we experience in life happen when there is no deadline to meet, no appointment to make, and nowhere else we have to be. Sometimes the space we are so quick to fill is exactly the space we need most.

Life is better when we leave a little margin. KT

We have a little 4.8lbs squirrel that is supposed to be a Yorkie dog. She is temperamental, rumbustious, and does four things very well. Eat, poop, pee and love us. She does that last one, really well.

When she looks at me, she thinks I am a better man than I may actually be. Her love is unconditional and is similar in nature to the way God loves me. There are very few loves in our lives that are truly unconditional. The love of a parent for their child is one example, but this side of heaven, there are very few unconditional loves in our life, except for your dog. Maybe that is why dog is God spelled backward.

They forgive our failures, and they love us instead of our faults and are always happy to see us when we come home. They never have bad days, they never get their feelings hurt, they never lash out in anger, and they are always ready for some scratching and loving.

See, I think God created all the animals of the world and saved the dog for last, so he could create one animal that craves and needs the attention and love of a human. That is a dog.

So, the next time your dog looks at you with those understanding and forgiving eyes of love, why don’t we try to live up to their expectations and be the person our dog thinks we are. KT

I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, back in the early ’90s working on a hotel we were selling. I had a couple hours before the meeting, so I was in the hotel room making some notes and turned the TV on for some background noise. I was flipping through the channels on the TV trying to find a news station. 

At the time, I was deeply in debt with the restaurants, and my financial life seemed to be in free fall. I was at the point where I needed a fresh word from God.

So, here I was sitting in a hotel room flipping channels, and you know how it is when you are trying to find something that will hold your interest. There was channel with this lawyer who was speaking at some business event; he also happened to be a Christian. I didn’t want to hear this guy, so I listened to him for a few seconds and flipped the channel, I got a few channels over and went back to hear for a few more seconds. After I went back to the channel where he was speaking about the fifth time, I decided to hear what he was saying. Thirty minutes later, I was crying sitting on the bed because it was exactly what I needed to hear at the time.

The attorney’s name was Bob Deal from Richmond, Virginia, and he was speaking to a large audience, telling a story that simply captivated my spirit. Bob Deal had a friend that was having financial issues, and the friend asked Bob to go have dinner with him and give him some advice on his situation. Remember that Bob Deal was and attorney but also a Christian. Before the dinner meeting, Bob prayed that the Lord would give him the words he needed to speak into this man’s life. Here they were at dinner, and the friend was clearly in financial trouble and could not see a way out.

Bob was still waiting for the Lord to give him the wisdom to share with his friend. After the plates were taken away and they were having coffee, Bob had a ding in his spirit and looked at the man and said the weirdest thing. Bob said, “Tell me what your closet, dresser and garage look like.” The man looked at Bob like he had lost his mind. Finally, the man told Bob that his closet hadn’t been cleaned or organized in years, the top of his dresser was stacked with stuff, and his garage was so full he couldn’t get his car in it.

Bob Deal looked at the man and said, go home, clean your closet, your dresser, and your garage; Make sure you do it well, perfect and completely as though it were the first time. Don’t just stuff things under the bed and don’t hurry. Organize it. Do it very well because, during the process of this mental cleansing of the clutter in your life, the Lord will give you the answer to your financial situation.

At this point, I was still sitting on the bed in the hotel room, and it was a though he was speaking only to me. Bob Deal’s friend did as instructed, and he developed a new path for his financial situation that worked out for him; he was able to avoid bankruptcy. I also did what Bob Deal told his friend to do, and it was as though it was spiritual therapy for me at that crossroad in my life. The cleaning out of the everyday things helped me be more organized in my thoughts and greatly helped me navigate through my own financial mess back in the early ’90s.

So, I now clean my closet and garage several times a year, and I have one of the most organized garages in town. Sometimes, it’s the simple things that are within our control where we need to start. The first act of faith is to simply step forward, even when you don’t know exactly where you are going. Just maybe the first step or act of faith is cleaning up where you currently live. KT

This simple five-word question, if asked before big decisions, would greatly impact many of the decisions we make in life. It would help us with decisions regarding Jobs, relationships, investments, health, homes, cars, money and probably many other areas.

Let’s say you have an opportunity to change careers or the company you work for. In many decisions we make, we often look at only the upside potential, but rarely do we look at the downside. Take a job change for instance, you have the ‘feeling’ the new job will be better that the one you have, but sometimes that greener grass on the other side of the fence doesn’t quite turn out the way you planned it in your mind.

Take important financial moves. If we asked ourselves, “what if I am wrong,” and if you can answer that it will still be ok and that it won’t upend your life, then maybe it is an ok decision. Many times, people act like they are playing poker with the decisions in life and just push all the chips to the center of the table without asking, what if I am wrong?

Those five words could be some of the best advice we could ever hear because it forces us to actually answer that question. If you can ask that question and come away with an acceptable answer, then you will probably be alright.

I have made some doozies of bad decisions in my life (like buying the chicken restaurants) and if I had honestly asked myself that question before jumping off, I wouldn’t have lost my shirt,,,,, and my pants. So, the next time you are facing an important decision in any area of your life, ask yourself, “what if I am wrong?” If you answer honestly, it may just save you from owning some chicken restaurants. Ha. KT

Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) was thrust into the Presidency of the United States on November 22, 1963, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  He was a seasoned leader with many years of experience but was still unprepared to step into the presidency the way it happened.

As soon as the flight from Dallas got back to Washington, he called all of his national advisors and the whole cabinet together and made a statement that reverberates even today. It also offers an example of what true leadership looks like.

He looked at everyone in the room, and said, “mistakes will be made, but inaction will not be one of them.” He basically told them to get ready because while the sadness of that day was ever present, there was no time to shut down. The US had to still lead the world.

When I think about us today and how to put this into practice in our own lives, I think about the mountain tops and valleys of life. When we are walking through the low points of life, (the valleys) it is easy to get scared, afraid and complacent and want to just get under the covers and turn the lights out and hope things will change on their own. In the real world, those reactions are simply not an option for people who are not ready to quit life.

Harmon Born was my mentor and passed away several years ago. He owned the Ford Dealership in Downtown Atlanta and for many years, his dealership was the highest volume Ford dealership in the nation. He used to say, “you just have to chin-up and move forward.”

I think this is the message for all of us, regardless of the stage of life you are in. Inaction just isn’t an option; we must keep moving forward. You just can’t camp out in the valley of life, you have to get back to high ground. As LBJ said, “mistakes are going to be made, but inaction will not be one of them.” KT