Simplicity

Noah has been co teaching a class on Spiritual Disciplines. One of them is Simplicity. Basically, simplicity is getting rid of the stuff in our lives that distract us from what is really important. It can be different things for different people. For some people it is too much stuff, for others money, for others activities, for others double talk or word games.

We have been talking about and trying to evaluate what are we letting complicate our lives? It is easy, I think, to say "oh, church activities are too much", but I don't think that is really our problem. I think it is obvious from my "to do list" what is complicating our lives:

1. Laundry
2. Clean something, anything!
3. Go through and get rid of stuff

That is pretty much always the start of my list.

So I got to thinking about it. If I am spending so much time "managing" and "organizing" our stuff, maybe we just have too much stuff. I have organized and reorganized, but it seems like if there are too many toys or too many clothes, it doesn't matter how much I cleverly stash things: doing it all over still ends up on my list.

So I ask myself. "Julie, do you just stink at keeping things neat, clean and organized?" And I answer myself, "Yes. Yes you do." But I do know that I AM able to keep the rooms in my house that are naturally less cluttered looking nice. So I am determined to keep at the eliminating junk part of my life so that the first 3 things on my list can instead be something more important or Kingdom Worthy.

What about you? Has anyone out there taken steps toward simplicity? What have you done?