Simplicity

I wish I could remember the exact year it was when I first heard God tell me to write a song. I was no more than eight or nine years old. I will never forget how one minute I was playing barbies and the next I had the yellow legal pad on my bedroom floor and out came the song, “Path of Love.” I sang it all the time, “if you stay with your Christ on the path of love.” I sang it at our church while my feet dangled off the piano bench, I sang it at my piano recital, I sang it until I’m sure my parents were ready for God to give me a new song. I knew with all my heart, that if I just stay with Jesus on His path and His plan, I would be okay no matter what. 

Driving in my car, now as a 36-year-old, the lyrics of this old song came to mind. I sat there and thought, “oh my how I have tendencies to overcomplicate my journey with Jesus when in all reality, it continues to be the simple path of love that always brings me back to Him. When I was in my college years, I did a really good job at getting off my little path of love. I was searching for things I didn’t even know I was looking for, questioning truths, and looking for people to heal old wounds. It was a hard time and I was overcomplicating God’s truth about Him and His truth about who He made me to be. I now look at those harder years and I see God never left me in those times, He was always right there, putting me back on the path to Him. I had a moment when I knew all my rebelling wasn’t getting me anywhere. I pulled my car off to the side of the road and I cried out to God, more like I screamed, “I need you.” In an instant, I saw a bridge with missing bricks between me and Jesus, and suddenly the bricks were put back in place and I ran to my Father’s open arms.

The truth is, that we are a people of answers, of searching and when we feel like God isn’t working, we tend to look elsewhere. We start “adding things” to our God that does not need to be added to. We start creating our own ideas of truth and listening to the lies that if you simply just believe in the simple gospel, then you are not full of wisdom. Sometimes simple can correlate to foolish, or uneducated. The problem with this mindset is that it gives people a right of passage to look elsewhere. I have seen close friends believe that there must be more than just the Bible and God’s truth. They start searching, usually because they have been wounded, and then suddenly God isn’t enough anymore. In truth and love, God is perfect, He is enough, and that there is beauty in simple, sincere trust that there is nothing else that can save us from eternal death in Hell. It is simply, Jesus.

Psalms 116:16 says, “The Lord preserves the simple; I was brought low, and He saved me.” God wants us to protect the simple truth, even when we are at our lowest state, even when things are hard or complicated. God reminds us to protect the simplicity of His gospel. That He came, He bled, He died, He rose, and now He sits and cheers you on. Why? Because the bible tells us so and there is nothing that needs to be added to this truth.

The other night Oliver was caught in a little white lie. After Daddy and I talked to him, disciplined him, and sent him to bed, I went and gave him another good night kiss. I told him, “daddy and I are like bumpers on a bowling alley, when you start to get a little off the path and doing things that you shouldn’t, daddy and I are here to help you get back on that path so you can live this life to the fullest and do all the things that God has planned for you.” After my award-winning speech, Oliver looks at me with his big brown eyes and said, “mom, why can’t we keep the bowling shoes?” Ha! The truth is, that we are all on a path of love, just trying our best to keep on the straight and narrow, and know that the best way to do this in this overcomplicated life is to simply stay with your Christ on the path of love. 

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. 2 Corinthians 1:12