Wednesday, June 10, 2009

KISS

Keep it simple, sweetheart! That’s a catchy phrase and acronym. There’s a lot of truth contained there. We love to be complicated – it makes us feel we are somehow more sophisticated, smarter. We want to impress with our knowledge. Most of us can take the most straight-forward, simple thing and complicate it beyond understanding. And think we’ve done a good thing!

The very best and most important things in life are actually very simple. But when something sounds too “easy” we have a hard time believing it. For instance, take God’s plan of salvation. It is straight-forward and simple. Nothing complicated about it. God’s ways are simple and clear-cut. Most times our ways are convoluted and confusing.

Rather than making everything in life more complicated than it needs to be, I believe we should embrace becoming simple people. That description tends to have a negative connotation – people don’t want to be considered “simple-minded” but being simple is something entirely different. If you don’t like that term, how about being uncomplicated?

According to the dictionary definition, simple means, among other things: To be free from guile, innocent; free from ostentation or display ; sheer, unmixed; readily understood or performed. It is the opposite of complex or complicated.

Another definition for simple is “single.” When you have a single thing – there’s no question about it, no decision to make – it stands alone. The Bible tells us to be single-minded. Actually what the scripture tells us is that a double-minded man who constantly wavers and changes his mind every five minutes, will not receive anything from God. In another verse we are told to let our yes be yes and our no be no. Don’t complicate it! Say what you mean and mean what you say. God also tells us to keep our eye “single” in one translation. To me that says focus. Get to the heart of the matter and don’t complicate it with a lot of unnecessary information.

All the very best things in life are inherently simple. I don’t know about you but I want to be an uncomplicated person whose words are clear and sincere. I want people to know where I stand without question. I want my actions to match my beliefs. Simple. Not always easy but simple. I guess the bottom line is I want to imitate my Heavenly Father and KISS.

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