“So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken” (Gen. 3:23, NIV).

Our pastor recently preached a sermon about the margins of life. Providential circumstances like poor health, an injury, an aging parent, or a new job are all used by God to take us off center stage and sideline us for a time. We all spend time in the margins, and we can be grateful for these marginal times because God uses them to take us off the rat race of life and put our focus on Him. God is not found in the busyness of life. We find Him in the margins of life and it’s here that we grow and learn to become more dependent on His mercy and grace.

Many Bible characters illustrate life in the margins. God created Adam and Eve and put them center stage in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2). Then they turned against God by eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:1-8). They thought they had found a better way than obeying God, so God cast them out of the garden and into the margins of life. However, God showed them grace by making tunics of skin to cover their nakedness and He showed them mercy by allowing them to be the parents of all mankind (Gen. 3:21). Abraham and Sarah were childless, and in Biblical times, infertility was disgraceful. Those who couldn’t bear children were often ostracized and treated with shame. God finally blessed them with the promised child, Isaac, but not until Sarah was in her nineties and Abraham was one hundred years old.

None of us enjoy being in the margins of life. Most of us, including myself, would rather be on center stage where the action is, but that’s not where God has us right now and we must be obedient to Him. Our time on the sidelines should draw us closer to Christ, and we can consider ourselves very blessed because it’s in the margins of life that God often reveals Himself.