Simplify, Simplify.

I am not sure when it started happening.  Maybe it is always that way.  Maybe it is true that significant moments begin without our being aware it is happening.  Maybe it was in the decision to take an appointment calendar out of my shirt pocket for the last time. Or, maybe it started when my watch quit working and I chose not to replace it.  And  then there was that day of anticipating retirement when I started the painful process of culling my book collection which had been with me a life time.  It is only in the looking back that I realized the journey toward a more simple life had started.

 

But, what I discovered was that it was not quite that simple.  Being a preacher and living with a mindset which always caused me to think about the theology of what was happening, I came to realize that the call to simplify was not so much like the one sounded by Thoreau, but the one sounded by Jesus.  It is not in the process of discarding things that simplicity happens, but in the process of sacrificing the valued stuff of life until there is nothing left but our desire for God.  Abraham on the mountain ready to sacrifice his son is the classic Old Testament story.  The story of Jesus on the cross is the one to be remembered from the New Testament. 

 

To live more simply is to discard one valued thing at a time everything until there is nothing except our longing for the presence of God.  It is not that we no longer regard family and the pursuits of life as things of value, but that we come to a place of wanting to live with an awareness of God in our daily lives.  It is more than just a longing, but a conviction that all of life boils down to how we manage to live it out with God.  It is when our will and ego is finally sacrificed to God that we really start moving toward understanding what it is to simplify our life.