Simplicity

My friend Laura wrote a post on her website today called “The Return“, detailing some thoughts on their return to Honduras. They spent a little over a month back here in the States raising money and awareness for their missions organization. A couple paragraphs caught my attention.

I love the simplicity of life in Puerto Lempira  … the ease of walking to the store, eating basic food, spending time talking to people on the street, doing the basic daily things to keep a home running, teaching my kids, celebrating the rare little things like marshmallows and real butter. Now, if only we could combine this simple life with our US family and friends!

I do believe some of the stress problems that people experience in the US are related to the complicated nature of living there.  Just my observation.

I do believe that Laura is right on this, and she and her family have a perspective that most of us will never have. We can’t see that contrast between worlds that they can. I think much of the stress that those of us in the United States and the modernized world experience is because we make our lives so complicated. We have Facebook that keeps us riveted to the goings on of all our friends, virtual or otherwise. We have 24-hour news channels devoted to bringing us the most excruciating details of stories that 20 years ago we would never have known about. We have smartphones that we keep tethered to our hands, ready for the next important (or so we think) phone call, email, text, HeyTell, or FarmVille notification.

I’m as guilty as the next person about all this. (Except FarmVille. FarmVille is dumb, and I’ll not argue this point.) I spend way too much time swiping a finger over the glass of my iPhone, and not enough time away from technology. Even as I write this, I’m using my laptop with a second monitor, looking at my iPad and taking a picture with my iPhone. I could explain it all away by saying that I need these things because of work or church or kids or whatever, but I’m kidding myself. I don’t need to be reachable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What I do need is to preserve the simple things and worry less about the false busyness that invades our life.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:12:

¹² For our boasting is this: the testimony of our conscience that we conducted ourselves in the world in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom but by the grace of God, and more abundantly toward you.

How much do we complicate our lives by feeding into it knowledge that we don’t need, the “fleshly wisdom” that Paul talks about here? The word “simplicity” in this passage denotes innocence, sincerity, the opposite of duplicity. How can we continue to fill ourselves with all the information that the world feeds us, yet maintain our innocence towards God and each other?

In this introduction of Paul’s letter he is telling the Corinthians that he has dealt with them with honesty and integrity, that these letters are all that he has written to them. He is defending himself to the church, asking them to see that the actions he took were not done out of his own desires but by the grace of God. When we deal with other people and we have been filling our heads with the things of the world, do you think that they see us as honest and straightforward? If we are clear in our motivations and up front about what we are doing, does this show simplicity to them and make us more believable, better witnesses for God’s message?

The church could stand to be more simple. Actually, I should say that the American/Westernized church could stand to be more simple. We have our lights and big drums, our coffee, our conferences, but do we have the Gospel? When we take the focus off the show and put it on the Gospel, we people still be there? In our pursuit of relevance, do we complicate church with worldly wisdom? How can we make it more simple? May we all be blessed to see less of ourselves and more of Him in our services.