If you’re looking for a quick fix on time management to simplify your life, or ‘seven easy steps to simplicity,’ or even tips on how to create margin in your life, this book isn’t it. Most of us have tried all that, and it lasts a few days or a few weeks, at best. Instead, this Spiritual Simplicity book is for people who already understand what they need to do, want desperately to do it, but find it next to impossible to break free of the complexity of too many good and important things.
This book is for people who are tired, overextended, emotionally exhausted, and spiritually drained. In your effort to grow spiritually, help your children develop their gifts, hold down a job, serve at church, be a caring neighbor, stay in shape, coach Little League, and drive the car pool, you are personally maxed out! Weekends are packed with marathon sporting events and spiritual responsibilities. Weekdays start early, end late, and all too often find you eating fast food on the run.
But, overextended, fast-paced, emotionally exhausting lifestyles are not reserved for the married with children. Singles find work to be a merciless taskmaster, and weekends are crammed with social and spiritual agendas that require half of Monday to recover.
If you’re ready to make a change, the key to simplifying your life is not strategically creating margin or exercising managerial control of your schedule. Spiritual simplicity will be achieved by doing less because we love more. Love redirects our focus and unravels the complex, overextended lifestyle that keeps us ever running but never arriving. As you learn the practice of really loving people in your relational network, you’ll begin to experience:
- A shift from complex to simple.
- A substitute for ‘bigger-better-faster-more.’
- A satisfaction from receiving God’s love and demonstrating it to others.
In other words, doing life God’s way results in rest for your soul! We will never regret investing ourselves in what really matters–the relationships God has placed in our lives. And when we choose to do less and love more, we’ll find that we actually end up accomplishing more–not more activity but more of what lasts for eternity.