Monday, February 11, 2008

Breaking the Silence

OK, the blog has been MIA. No excuses--I just went silent. It was certainly nothing personal, just a lapse. I promise to do better!

I find that the older I get, the more some things seem to simplify. In the past I may have envisioned complicated solutions for problems or challenges. But now experience has taught me that the solutions are much more simple to articulate, and harder to implement.

And there's the irony: the real solutions can be explained simply, but are much harder to actually live out.

For instance, marriage can be very complicated, but successful marriages are often quite simple: they are characterized by moment-by-moment selflessness. Selflessness is a simple, one-word solution, that is remarkably difficult to live out. But selflessness goes to the heart of our character.

Maybe that's why we try to create these complex solutions. They sound good, and they allow us to avoid the hard reality that the real solutions demand.

Maybe I should have stayed quiet.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Andy. I'm back-reading. Reading your posts from months before and responding in the context of today. Whatever that is... Chris taught yesterday in The Dig for Ed while he is in PNG. Chris taught on Hell. It was interesting. I was struck by what I think is the same idea you spoke of in this post, chiefly, the way we make things complex in order to avoid the difficulty of the simple solution. It's always been interesting to me how everyone complains about how God could allow the "uninformed" person to go to Hell. But, that's the simple made complex. The simple part of it is, usually, the folks complaining, including myself, are informed. Rather than simply answering "Yes" or "No", we deflect to the imagined plight of the "uninformed" and use that as our excuse not to answer God's call.

I'm rambling, but, I thought it worth commenting.

Cheers.