Simplicity

I don't lead a simple life...I don't think many do. It's complicated and messy...and busy. Relationships are imperfect. There is pain in people's lives...people I love dearly. Plans don't work out the way you want them to. And when they do work out, they are all on the same weekend and you may end up regret making some of them. Just sayin'... Then there are the hopes and dreams; some get dashed and some become more beautiful than you ever imagined, but Lordy, they take a lot of work either way. Romance is desired, but there are precious few sweet moments of it.

I think while life is complicated we do have moments of simplicity...so beautiful and often unexpected that they steal your breath away. And they may come at the oddest times. It takes some skill to recognize them, but once you look for them, they do appear. And they are treasures.
My simplicity....


Coffee with cream and buttered toast in the kitchen on a quiet Sunday morning with nowhere to go. The sun shining through the open window and the sound of chickadees twittering in one ear and the soft rumble of my husband's snores in the other...









A dark, solitary, early morning after a dark, emotional, painful night in the Argentine desert, and the blackness lifted, in numerous ways, by the sun rising bringing the brightest most orange light ever seen, soooo large in the sky and bringing with it a promise of the constancy of God...

Laying in an open field in the middle of a summer night shivering from the dew damp ground beneath, swathed in blankets and huddled with some of the dearest young women in the world, staring up at a pitch black sky, littered with innumerable pinpricks of light, murmuring of inconsequentional, silly and life changing things....




Relaxing in a recliner on a Sunday evening after a busy weekend, and hearing the sounds of young people...laughing, praying, crying, reading God's word....drifting up from the downstairs rec room...knowing they could be a hundred other places but they choose here...with each other...to be where you are...

A family dinner, where all are gathered after having been long apart...not all is calm or even right between each other...but all are together within the walls of the place we call home, and while not always easy...it is the only time that home is right...when they are all there, safe for the moment. And there is a sweet possibility of hope for something better for us all...

There have been a hundred other moments where the sweet simplicity...the sweet truth of the moment is so profound, my heart expands to a point I don't believe my body could bear. And I feel all the complexity and importance in what we do from day to day fade to just these simple, precious treasures....life is really not that complex at all.