Practicing Faith: Simplicity

Hello, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Glad that you joined us.
Thank you for keeping us up with us through this series of spiritual practices.
Today,
a pretty broad topic.
We’re going to talk about simplicity and how it applies to various aspects of one’s life,
and of course, especially one’s spiritual life.
And it is difficult,
I think, in the area of
simplicity, Michael, to simply locate it in any one aspect of our life.
It’s a kind of trait that
has an overflow into all the various parts of our life,
and I think it has something to offer us
in a lot of different areas.
Yeah, and I wonder for those of you joining us if this might not be
maybe one of the least expected topics that we’re going to cover in this series,
especially if you’ve been a Protestant your entire life.
The Reformed tradition,
Clint, has never really had a whole lot to say about,
say, taking oaths of poverty that you might
have in, like, the Roman Church.
We don’t have some of those structural things that the ancient
church certainly had in its vocabulary.
But then in other ways,
we do, and we’ll talk a little bit
about simplicity in worship.
That’s certainly a part of our tradition,
and it goes all the way
back to the founding of really the Reformed stream of the faith.
But yeah, as we turn to this idea of simplicity,
I think that we would all do well,
especially as people who,
if you’re with us in this
series concurrently as it’s happening,
we’re coming up here upon Thanksgiving season.
It’s stewardship season here at the church.
This is a time of year when lots of people,
not just in church,
are thinking about finances.
They’re thinking about what it means to be good stewards of them.
And I do think that sometimes it’s good to return to some of those key scriptural and
theological sort of principles that help ground us and remind us that more isn’t necessarily better,
that there’s a way of letting go of the things that get in between us and practicing the faith.
And it opens doors and pathways for us to really experience our faith with some new freedom that
we might not take for granted.
And there’s a certain irony in the season,
Michael, in that we,
well, we talked gratitude last week in this sort of seasonal celebration of gratitude with
Thanksgiving, and the idea that we celebrate being blessed by eating about 5,000 calories,
and then the very next day we set records for shopping,
for going out and buying things.
So simplicity is a little bit of a tough sell.
It is kind of in our Presbyterian heritage, but
as Presbyterians, we don’t really regularly have a church-wide period of fasting.
If you’ve been Catholic or if you have friends who are Catholic or know anything about the Catholic experience,
as they go through Lent,
there is that idea of restraining yourself,
refraining from meat or giving something up for Lent.
Lots of Protestants do that.
But maybe another way to
talk about simplicity that could be helpful is the idea of withdrawal or the idea of restraining
ourselves, of intentionally cutting back.
Throughout a lot of this series,
Michael, we’ve talked about things we add to our life.
And I think as we approach the idea of simplicity,
we switch pages,
kind of switch directions,
and we think about, well,
what might I remove or what
might I streamline in my life?
In other words, are there places where I have too much or are
there places where cutting back on something even seasonally might help me learn discipline and
might help me free up time and might help me free up resources or whatever it is,
but the ways in
which restraining can move us forward in the faith.
Yeah, and there you’re already illustrating how
this really hops into a lot of categories that we’ve already covered.
Things like the physical
restraint.
We often talk about this fasting when we keep ourselves from eating something.
You might also have things like restraining what we say.
We’ve talked a little bit in our time
together about the things that we say.
I think that simplicity is really helping us boil down
into the core things of what is meaningful and what isn’t, what is true,
what is helpful to faith,
and what holds us back.
And I think that that will look different in lots of different categories of
life.
But I give maybe as an example of that is the idea of fasting because, Clint,
fasting is now a cultural word for dieting.
In most places online,
when you read the blog,
when they talk about
fasting, they’re talking about it from the vantage of this is a way to lose weight.
This is a way to
get your body to look this particular way.
And there’s some sort of secret that if you learn
the secret, do the thing, it’s going to result in this desired outcome.
And that’s not the purpose of simplicity.
The purpose of fasting from the theological spiritual perspective is really to
help us see our life differently.
That’s been this overarching theme,
and it’s once again true here.
The idea being that we discover the things that we’ve taken for granted are A,
a thing that we
could be aware of and be grateful for.
We could return thanks to God,
the creator who gives us
this food, who gives us this reminder of daily provision.
But also, and in addition to that,
the absence of things in our life tends to sort of create space for us to actually begin to see God
in new and creative ways.
In other words,
in the moment where we were eating junk food and sitting
on the couch or whatever the thing was we were doing,
just sort of taking for granted the
resources we have, that can then lead to time in which we no longer doing such things can set aside
time to actually read scripture, to actually pray.
Simplicity,
in other words,
not only helps us
become more aware, but it creates a time and space in which we can have a new kind of awareness that
we might not have had otherwise.
I think that fasting is a good way to speak overall about
this idea of restraining,
this idea of cutting back.
And there are lots of ways historically
that’s been food.
We’ve talked about a fast as a period of intentionally not eating or perhaps not
eating some kinds of food,
and that has gotten popular.
But in the scripture,
in the religious tradition of Christianity,
that’s not a health endeavor.
It’s not something that the idea was
you’d lose weight or that you’d be healthier.
The idea is that you would make sure that nothing had
control over your life,
including whatever it is that you eat day to day.
And so a Christian would
undertake usually a day,
sometimes a couple days,
sometimes even maybe just from say morning till
evening, and then you’d break that with an evening meal.
But it was an intentional period of restraint.
And was it difficult?
Well,
in a day you’re not going to experience anything that you could really
call hunger, but you will want to eat.
And so the idea was that fasting also had a kind of discipline,
a lesson of learning some discipline.
I want to do this,
but instead of just doing it,
I’m going to refrain from doing it.
And when I feel hungry,
I might pray,
I might read my scripture,
I might do a lesson in the Bible,
I might do something else.
And that hopefully then when I returned to eating,
I would be also have maybe a sense of gratitude for the ability to have food.
And Michael, we live in a very interesting time.
Historically,
in our country,
you know,
historically,
it was those only those really who were of a wealthy class that could have ever been
overindulgent with food.
I mean, your average person in Jesus’ day,
they walk all day,
they work,
they don’t have as much food as they can just eat and eat and eat.
The food that they
eat is fairly healthy,
fairly natural just by virtue of that time.
And so historically,
it was really kind of only that wealthy class that was generally accused of say overindulging or gluttony.
We, at least in American society,
have a very different experience.
Really,
from lower
socioeconomic levels all the way up to very wealthy people,
we all have access, generally speaking,
to more than enough food,
except maybe some who live at the very bottom levels of poverty in our country.
But for the most part,
this is a struggle that doesn’t necessarily take care of it.
Self-naturally, if you are a middle class or even lower class household income,
you probably still have a cupboard full of food.
You probably still have the opportunity
to lean into food more than you should and to let it become overly important in your life.
And so fasting historically has been about food and our relationship with it,
though it doesn’t have to be.
We can talk about fasting from television.
We can talk about fasting from media.
We can talk about
vows of silence in which people say,
“I’m going to spend a period of an hour or two hours or maybe
a 24-hour period where I’m going to be silent.
I’m going to fast from words.” And there are lots of
things we can talk about cutting out of our life temporarily or seasonally to try and learn some of
the lessons that fasting offers us.
Yeah, I think we need to talk a little bit about some of those alternatives.
And before we get there,
I just do want to say one thing.
We sometimes forget that
there was a time when adolescents,
those people who, of course, in Jesus’ day,
an adolescent became an adult far quicker than in our own time.
But an adolescent would know what it would mean to truly
wonder where their food was coming from or to truly know this is the extent of food that I can eat.
As somebody who’s had virtue of working with lots of different students from lots of different families,
even students whose families don’t do incredibly well financially,
I don’t know of a
single student who knows that daily process of,
“I don’t know if I’m going to have food.” I mean,
I don’t think many of us can even comprehend the idea that there is a hard limit of what you could
eat today, that there isn’t something else waiting out there.
The store’s not waiting there with food.
It doesn’t exist.
If it didn’t come from your garden,
if you hadn’t grown it, it’s not there.
And there’s a kind of natural faith that arises out of that prayer.
“Give us this day our daily bread to a person for whom daily bread is the reality.” That is a
persistent profession of faith.
When the Goecke family sits down over a table where there’s
more than enough food than what we would be able to consume at that table,
that prayer does seem different.
When it’s, “I don’t like the bread that you made today,
Mom.” Right?
It’s not a question of,
“Would we have bread?” It’s,
“Did I like the bread?” And I think that moves us into some of these
other areas of life where we are so often quick to judge the things that we have by whether we
like them or not.
I think television is a great example of that.
Nobody could consume all of the
television that happens every day.
But we do have expectations,
“Well, I like that television.
I don’t like this television.” And simplicity enables us in that place or in what you read or in what you
wear or all of these other areas of life to consider,
instead of it just being about our
own metric of what we like or dislike,
what we prefer or not prefer,
we can begin to recognize
with the sheer gratitude of,
“But yet I have this and I have it because it’s a gift of God.
It’s a gift that God has given to me and therefore I’m called to be a steward of it.” And that transformation,
I think, flips it all upside down.
It goes from,
“I’m entitled to the things that I think I should
have,” to, “I am blessed because God has given me this thing regardless of what I feel about it.”
And that, I think, Clint, is where we begin to see simplicity drilling to the bedrock of what
matters away from the stuff that we might call preference towards the stuff that shows us who
God is and is therefore a constant that we can be grateful for.
One of the things I appreciate
about simplicity and one of the things I think it offers us is that it is intrinsically connected
to other things in our life.
So if we pursue simplicity in our finances,
it’s inevitably going to lead us down avenues of stewardship.
If we practice simplicity in regard to our
time,
it is going to have to do with our management,
our relationship.
So simplicity,
if we cut back,
if we say, “I don’t need new things,
these things that I have,” it’s going
to teach us contentment.
And simplicity is a doorway,
I think, Michael, to many other spiritual realities,
all of which, at least as I can understand them, are positive.
And
please understand that when we say simple,
what we mean is that ability to kind of recognize when enough is enough.
You know,
I have a huge appetite.
I can eat and have always been able to
eat a ridiculous amount of food.
And when I got out of college and out of a situation in which
I could do that day in and day out and actually needed to to kind of keep up the calorie requirements,
I remember that one of the things I had to learn,
I rarely feel full.
I don’t know what it is, but I would have to just realize,
“Okay, you ate a plate of food.
That was enough.” And
you may want more,
but you don’t need more.
And it seems to me that simplicity in very
“simple terms”
is wrestling with that question.
What do I need versus what do I want?
And in America, that’s a difficult question because we generally have our needs met and our wants get put on the
front burner all the time.
So you’re exactly right, Michael.
We don’t talk about having enough food.
We talk about whether we like the food.
In many parts of the world,
whether you like it or not,
is just a completely foreign question.
That’s food.
You like eating.
You may or may not like the food.
It doesn’t matter if you like it.
It’s your food today.
And that’s hard for us to resonate with.
And again,
one of the things that simplicity does is it connects us with compassion as we
realize the choices and the plethora of opportunities we have in something as
simple as our diet.
When you can walk through the grocery store and look at a shelf of beans and find 14 varieties,
you begin to be more sensitive to the plight of those who don’t have that,
who the plight of those who live with less.
And you may even begin to see the connections of
somehow of how our abundance sometimes blinds us to the needs of others.
I love having young kids in my life,
also having worked with youth.
I’m sure, Clint, you’ve had this circumstance when you worked with youth as well.
I love when the conversation turns
to wealth because every child is confident that they know what wealth is.
It’s big houses,
fast cars,
flashy clothes.
Every kid, it just seems genetic that they have built into them this idea,
well, dad, are they rich as if they know exactly what that is?
And one of the things that you learn,
not just as you grow and matures as a person,
but I think as you gain some spiritual maturity,
you begin to see that the people who are wealthiest tend to have gotten there because they
chronically believe that they’re not.
They’re always raising an income or raising a
sort of lifestyle to reach where they’re at.
And there’s always more.
That’s the secret.
There’s always more rungs to the ladder.
And what’s interesting about simplicity is it teaches you
that the thing that that ladder begins to mean to you is a dead end,
that it doesn’t lead you
in the place that you think it will.
It’s going to lead you into more excess.
It’s going to lead you
to feel like you still don’t have enough at whatever level that you’re living.
And, you know, I think what’s fascinating is you begin to realize as you lean into simplicity that
some of the most simple things are some of the most powerful and poignant things.
And, you know, I point to an example of that in our girls lifetimes,
they’ve gotten hundreds of blankets,
maybe not hundreds, at least 30 blankets each.
But each of them has a blanket that was made by
a church member by hand.
That blanket, which is simple, is the most valuable among all of them,
regardless of their materials and what was put into that,
because it was made by a person with
an intention and given in that spirit of hoping to bless.
My girls don’t appreciate that yet.
Their life is still about the sparkly things with the unicorn on it, whatever.
But there will come
a day when hopefully they’ll begin to see that sometimes it’s the most simple thing in the
cupboard.
Sometimes it’s the most simple thing laying on your bed.
Those things can be the most
valuable things because they represent the thing that matters the most.
And that’s what simplicity
does is it helps teach us.
It becomes a tutor of what the most important things in life truly are.
And in that regard,
I do think that simplicity offers us a gift that we may not want.
And what I mean by that is that as we sit with simplicity,
as we try to spend time with the
question of simplifying our hearts and our lives and our possessions,
we are inevitably going to be challenged.
So I’m not a person for whom vehicle is very important.
I don’t need a nice vehicle.
And I’m not taking pride in that.
Just for whatever, I’m not a car guy.
And so I don’t really,
if it runs,
that’s fine.
I’m not really a house guy.
Our house is plenty big enough.
I don’t need,
but I own bicycles.
I have a bicycle that is worth not much less than the vehicle I drive.
And it is one of many.
So I like the things that I’m interested in,
I like to have the best.
I like to have good and better and improve those things.
And I think that those things matter.
And so the thing that I appreciate about simplicity is if you are willing to be in conversation with
it, it will almost inevitably deliver you to the place you need to be,
though it won’t be a comfortable place.
You’ll say to simplicity,
“Well,
I don’t really need anything.” And
simplicity will say, “How about living a day without your phone?” And you’ll say, “No,
I’ve got email.
I’ve got stuff I need to do.” Or simplicity will say,
“Well, would you really need a new
outfit?” You’ve got a hundred outfits in your closet.
And you say, “Wow, those are old simplicity.”
Simplicity will find a way,
I think, to challenge us, Michael.
And I think that’s a real gift that
it offers.
But it is not an easy.
It is very difficult to simply say,
“I’m going to simplify
my life.” Because I think what we will almost always find is that we’re willing to do that in some areas,
but in other areas,
we’re not going to be very excited about where that takes us.
Yeah. And the reason why these things are barriers,
why we find that simplicity challenges us,
is because often it’s the places where we get stuck where simplicity starts to sort of break
down the barrier.
And I think maybe a good time here in the conversation to bring up a historical
example of that, it certainly connects to the Reformed tradition.
And it relates to our worship.
One of the things that the Reformers were really concerned about was ornamentation in sanctuaries,
about the icons of Christians who had gone before, pictures,
sort of gilded organs,
beautiful ornate sanctuaries.
And the point that they made was that people would be tempted to
go into the place of worship and worship the place and the stuff and not the person to whom
those things should be pointing.
And so there was this whole outcry amidst the Reformers’ work
that we needed to clear out the sanctuaries,
that there should be white walls in place of colorful,
golden walls.
And that instead of putting a whole ton of different figures and sculptures in our places of worship,
where we might be tempted to look to them instead of the God who we are
worshiping, that our sanctuaries should essentially be as simple and clean as possible.
If you go out
to the east coast of the United States,
you go to some of the older Presbyterian churches that
still stand, you’re going to find sanctuaries with big windows,
white walls,
and not much in the
front of them, maybe a cross.
And there was something inherent in that idea that we need
to simplify our worship.
We need to simplify our worship spaces because these extra things
are getting in the way of the people and the God that they’re trying to worship.
That people are beginning to fixate too much on, hey,
this statue that was made by this master artist,
instead of the God who that master artist was trying to serve in creating it.
And I wonder if that isn’t,
in some ways, a parable clint for our lives,
that we too get stuck in between these things that
have begun to take on more meaning for us than they should.
And we would do well to sort of hit
that spiritual reset button and to find that,
no, there really is something too less as opposed to more.
Yeah, I think historically, one of the benefits of being Presbyterian is that there have
not historically been a lot of flashy Presbyterians.
We typically aren’t over the top kind of people.
Our churches are generally not ostentatious.
You know,
there would be decorative elements to them,
but on the whole,
Presbyterians have tried to live that out architecturally and in terms of
our buildings and our space and even our worship.
We’ve always been nervous to borderline obsessed
with the idea that we would be paying attention to the wrong things too much.
And there is a lesson
in that, I think, for us, a certain caution.
And I think as we try to bridge that general theme into
each of our individual lives, you know,
the questions that simplicity would ask us would,
I think, be along those lines.
Is this something I need?
Is there anything in my life that’s getting
too much of my attention?
What does my time look like?
What do my priorities look like?
Could you look at my life and the days that it’s lived out and apply the word simplicity?
And on one hand,
you could say, “Well, yes, I didn’t go to Hawaii.
I knew anything extravagant.”
But it’s the inner question as much as the outer question.
Am I making time?
If I
wrote down how I spend my days,
is there a simplicity in it?
If I think about relationships
and how I treat other people,
do I approach that with the simple kind of willingness or desire to
show love to other people?
And, you know,
simplicity is a difficult thing to talk about,
Michael, but if you’ve ever had the benefit to be around somebody who enacted simplicity in
the best way, they really are remarkable people,
people who can enjoy things without being overly attached to them,
people who can have things and quickly and easily part with them and remain
generous in spite of having resources.
And that is such a difficult balance to walk.
And one of the things, even simple pursuits,
even—I keep saying that—even basic pursuits of simplicity,
like periodic fasting or silence or giving up eating out for a season or whatever it might be,
of waiting a month to buy whatever it is that’s on our to-buy list.
One of the things that those
give us is that opportunity to take those steps.
And I think as we do that,
simplicity really
awakens in us opportunities to learn what it means in a variety of areas of our life.
Yeah, it invites us to consider that maybe the best way forward is also the hardest way forward,
because it is far more difficult,
in my experience, to pursue simple than it is to simply add more.
It’s easy to go to the store and find another thing to put in your cupboard.
I found it’s much
harder.
In fact, I would say, for me,
incredibly hard.
I’m the kind of person who likes to put
more stuff in the cupboard for later.
Well, I might need it.
I’d say my wife has the spiritual gift
of being able to say,
“We don’t need that,” and it finds its way out the door.
And what I’ve learned
from watching her, and I think what I’ve been able to see as time goes on, is that sometimes
getting rid of things or finding ways to cut things out would feel like that’s the easy thing.
But it’s not.
It’s actually sometimes the hardest because we’ve allowed these things,
our time, our schedules, our calendars,
our budgets,
we’ve allowed these things to take on
meaning for us that, “Well,
I’m a collector of this thing,” and maybe you haven’t collected it
for years, but the idea that you’re a collector of it means that you have to hold on to it.
And it’s hard.
It feels like you’re giving away a piece of you,
or it feels like you’re carving
out a piece of what matters to you.
And what simplicity does is it forces us to really
reckon with, to stare at and to identify, “No,
this thing or this commitment is not the same
as what I want to matter for me,
that I really do want to carve this thing out because it opens up
space for other things.” And so I do think that ironically,
while it might seem that simplicity
should be the easier path,
I think in many times it’s much harder to achieve in our life.
I do think simplicity is counter-cultural.
We are surrounded by voices that say,
you know, do bigger, do better,
get more,
go up the ladder,
get nicer stuff, get a bigger house.
I mean, that’s the waters we swim in.
And in the midst of all of those voices,
I mean, just watch a series of commercials for 30 seconds or for two minutes.
And these are the voices that
are speaking to us all the time.
It’s the environment that surrounds us.
And in the midst of that,
simplicity is that very small voice saying instead,
“Well, do you need that?
Why do you need that?
Why isn’t what you have adequate?
What else could you do with that
money?
What else could you do with this time?
Why does it matter what other people think?”
And I think, you know,
my experience, Michael,
those who are a little older tend to do a better job.
I think many times in the later years of our life,
it seems to me as an observer,
people have lived through all of that.
And as they get to the point where they’re
reconsidering what it means to be successful and if they have family and if there’s
happiness and connection and health,
that older people ironically seem,
in many cases, better able to let go of things.
They don’t need things.
In fact, they’re often trying to get stuff
out of their house and give it to others.
And maybe that’s something we learn as we evaluate
life from a little bit more advanced perspective is,
you know, all those things I thought I needed,
I really didn’t need it.
Maybe once you’ve gone through that cycle enough times,
you are able at some point to say,
“No, I don’t.” And I also want to be clear,
if this sounds, you know,
like we’re advocating that you should live on rice and beans for the rest of your life
and wear two outfits,
you know, three days at a time,
that’s not what we mean.
But in every life,
there is no way that you are listening to this on your phone or computer in the midst of middle
class America in the place we live in Iowa and you’re not able to think that there would be some
areas in your life that you could simplify,
whether those are physical areas, whatever it is.
Simplicity is a tremendous spiritual practice and a tremendous spiritual gift.
And there will,
without doubt, be places for each of us that we could use them.
Now, I don’t want to overemphasize some of the clearest examples.
I think stuff
is clearly a very accessible example of this,
Clint, because we all know what it is to want
something to acquire it.
But I think there are other examples that may be not as intuitive,
but are really significant.
And let me for a moment here talk about time,
what it means to be
simple and to be thinking about what matters to us in our time.
It makes me think of a letter
that you received early on in the pandemic of family here at the church, just reflecting on
the good that happened when all of the schedules shut down and suddenly the family was eating
dinner together, spending time together.
And that person was reflecting in gratitude upon,
yet even though our lives stopped in a screeching moment,
that God has been faithful to us in this time.
And I think we have certainly preceding the pandemic.
And in some cases,
families have returned to it, Clint,
just a frenetic schedule.
It had not thought through buffet of things to do.
And I don’t want to be overly critical here,
but I do think it takes a little bit of humility at
some point to step back and say,
“Why is it that we haven’t been home a single night this entire week?
Why is it as a family we’ve not dined together and actually shared conversation?”
These are challenging sort of words,
but yet simplicity might lead us to believe that not
everything that demands our time is worth setting aside on our calendars to do it,
that all of us are making choices surrounding that.
And I do think that there are times where
it’s worth stepping back and recognizing,
“No, there are some things that we must learn to say
no to so that we can carve out spaces where we can do things that are more important as people of faith,
as husbands and fathers,
as all of these sort of things that we know should be important,
but yet we don’t find time for them.” Well,
the only way to do that is through action and choice.
And I think sometimes we’ve struggled with that.
As a family that has gone through that for many years,
I think often we let the activities
and the things we’re involved in set the agenda as if we don’t have any authority over our own
schedule, as if we couldn’t say no.
And on this day,
we’re not going to do that thing,
or this day we’re going to eat together.
And I wonder, Michael,
coming out of the pandemic at some point,
if it’s maybe a little hard to appreciate now that it feels forced on us for so many months.
But I wonder if…
So I have a friend that works in an industry,
they haven’t been doing their meetings,
and he said, “We’re realizing that we traveled thousands of miles
a month to have meetings,
and I don’t think we’re going to do that anymore.” And in the same vein,
I wonder if there will be families who say,
“We appreciated being together three,
four, five evenings a night to sit down and have conversation as we ate together.” And the simplicity of that moment.
And I wonder if one of the things that may happen is that people will try to incorporate
some level of that as we return.
It would be a shame to lose that simply because we’re able to
go do all the things we wanted again.
Yeah, and there are others I’m mindful of who may be joining
for this conversation who’ve been stuck in your house for months,
and the simplicity feels more like a prison,
and you’re trying to find ways to stay interested and stay engaged,
and you say, “Hey, yeah, simplicity isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.” And to those joining us,
there’s actually a long history in Christian tradition.
Really,
the Desert Father Mothers
are a great example of this.
Someone like St.
John of the Cross wrote extensively about this spiritual
discipline of patience and waiting and consistency.
And I do think that sometimes we discover
in life’s long sort of marathon moments how difficult it is to let simplicity work within us.
This is the classic example,
Clint, of easier said than done.
Talking about protecting a schedule or
talking about not letting stuff own our attention,
talking about trusting God in difficult times.
These things are things that we all know should be a part of our lives,
but anyone who’s reflective
and has some humility knows we’re all struggling to do it.
We need God to be at work in us,
affecting these things, because left to our own devices,
this is so difficult to live out.
I think, again,
Michael, one of the opportunities,
perhaps, of this season we’ve been going through, this COVID stuff,
is that it pushes the reset button on some things.
And so I’ve heard people say,
“I didn’t realize how much I took for granted being able to go have dinner with my neighbor,
or being able to just get together with my family,
or go to a restaurant,
or come to church,
whatever it might be.” And if we could go back a year ago and think about the things we would have
said that were on our horizon,
the things we wanted to do,
they would have all likely been
more complicated than the things we’d like to do right now.
And there’s a certain upside to that,
because it maybe reminds us,
having lost some of those things temporarily reminds us of how much
they matter to us,
and they make us more grateful to say,
“Maybe I didn’t need that thing that I thought I did.
Instead, I would much rather just be able to hang out with my grandchild for a day
and not worry about where we went,
or I’d like to go to Arnold’s Park.
I’d like to…” Whatever that
looks like for you,
I don’t know, but those simple gifts.
And we realize, I think,
again and again through our life occasionally,
that those simple gifts are in many ways the most meaningful and most important.
Yeah, I think as I look for some very practical ways to live this out,
a person who comes to mind is the author Bob Goff.
He, if you haven’t read his book,
is a really practical
down-to-earth kind of guy,
inspiring in lots of ways.
And he talks about how every,
I believe it’s Tuesday, it was one day a week,
he said no to one thing.
He canceled one thing out of his life,
and his intention in doing that was to remind himself that you can say no.
Another thing that Bob Goff wrote about was how he always cut out the bottom of his left pocket,
so that his pocket
always had a hole in it.
And his point in doing that was to remind him every time he put his hand
in his pocket to not hold on to things too lightly or too tightly,
that you should live life loosely.
I think another way to live this out is in a practice that lots of us have,
a mentor of mine
wrote about for him,
every week he would sit down to look at his planner to figure out what’s coming this week.
And that very sort of just live your life kind of practice for him became a spiritual
practice when he began to ask himself,
“How can I intentionally carve out time for my relationship
with God this week?” And so the calendar time became for him the spiritual practice of making time for God.
So whether you’re practicing saying no in an intentional way,
whether you’re practicing making time for things that should matter as people of faith,
I do think that this should be beyond an intention.
But as people of faith,
it should be a practice.
It should be something
that is intended, because it will over time work within us,
the kind of effect that we know it should.
But the only way we get there,
Clint, is through actually doing it.
Yeah, and the practices of simplicity,
you know, to some practices, the goal is to learn to live
without something, to identify things in our life that may be barriers to us,
and to say, “You know what?
I can go without that thing.
I have this thing in my life that’s become too important to
me, and I want to leave it behind.” Maybe it’s a physical thing,
a possession,
maybe it’s a spiritual thing, criticism or complaining or something like that.
Some practices are seasonal.
I’m going to skip lunch every Monday for a while,
or maybe fast one day a week, because
there’s an opportunity to learn in that,
that I don’t need as much as I think I do,
and there’s a way to exert some control.
Now, obviously,
fasting is not a…
You’re not going to eliminate
food in your life,
nor should you, but it’s a way of saying,
“I’m going to do this.” And if you’re
looking at something and you’re tempted to purchase it,
what would it be like to say,
“You know what?
I don’t need that,
but the money that it was going to cost me,
I’m going to send to
a mission.
I’m going to send to a soup kitchen.
I’m going to sponsor a child with,
and I’m going to go out one less night a month,
and I’m going to sponsor a child every month with that same money.”
And simplicity teaches us how to look for ways to incorporate our faith into the world.
You know, we’re saying the same thing over and over and over again,
and we don’t want to be repetitive
or redundant, but simplicity is not generally something that comes natural.
When we call it
a practice, it really is.
Maybe as much as anything we’ve talked about, simplicity takes
discipline because it is so ingrained in us to go the other way.
It is almost against the practice
of human culture to try and have less,
to try and be less connected,
to try and be less important.
Simplicity is very much something I think that we need to work on,
but as we do,
I think it offers
us a lot of upside.
Yeah, I think by way of conclusion,
I think Jesus’ own words on this
is a fitting way to conclude.
Jesus talks about the kingdom of God and says that the great will
be least and the least will be greatest,
and we sometimes spiritualize that,
but I think as we talk about simplicity,
the kingdom of God turns our priorities upside down.
Jesus,
consistently throughout the Gospels,
reminds us that the things that we most naturally think are good
tend to in God’s eyes be flipped upside down,
and so whatever that is for you,
we’ve named a lot
of different things.
We sort of shotgunned out all of these different things that might be on that
list.
Maybe there’s a thing that we’ve missed, and for you,
you just know it.
You feel convicted of
it in this moment.
You know, these are the things that I think that if we are courageous and if we
are willing with hearts filled with faith to turn to God and to pray that prayer that we probably
really don’t want answered,
if we’re going to be honest,
God help me let go of the things that are
holding on to me.
Help me let go of the things that I’ve become convinced are the greatest,
so that I might become among the least,
that I can find what you mean,
and if we allow ourselves
to fall into that prayer,
to fall into these arms of grace that God seeks to hold us in.
And friends, I think what we’re going to find is this overwhelming comfort to know that our life
is far less on the edge than it feels like it is.
Whatever that storm cloud that we might feel like
is just behind us and we’re just trying to stay ahead of it,
that God is holding us and will be
with us.
And what we discover as we let go some of these other things is that a lot of the things
that have been driving us,
the voices that we sort of haven’t known have been dominating our attention,
they become quiet,
the winds become calm,
and like those disciples who are in the boat,
and suddenly the wind sees,
we see Jesus for who he is,
he is Lord of all,
and the simpleness of life
can sometimes enable us to see that reality in a way that we couldn’t have seen otherwise.
Yeah, that’s well said, Michael, and I think ultimately for the Christian,
the sweet spot of simplicity is to own things without being owned by them,
to enjoy things without depending on them,
and to understand that of all even the good things that are out there for us,
none of them are to be the cornerstone of our life.
None of them fulfill us because that’s the
role of Jesus Christ,
and if we’re not careful,
those very things can get in the way.
And so as we move forward,
certainly we have that balance between being, you know,
those ancient Christians that took a vow of poverty and those ancient Christian,
those other Christians who
thought that being rich and wealthy and having everything was a proof that they had pleased God,
and Presbyterians have at our best occupied that middle ground of saying,
“We want to encounter
the world and experience the world,
and that is okay as long as it doesn’t get in the way.” And
that’s where simplicity sets a path for us through some challenging landscape.
And so we hope there’s maybe something in this conversation that spoke to you,
and if you’d like to continue the conversation, as always,
drop a comment, drop an email.
We would love to keep that conversation going.
I think I speak for Michael.
Neither of us claim
any expertise in any of these regards,
but we do know something of the challenge of trying to
enact some of these things and the challenge of trying to consider what it means to live as faithful Christians.
And so as we do that together,
we’re grateful that you would
spend your time being part of the conversation with us,
and we hope it’s helpful.