Show of hands: who feels busy? If I were speaking, that’s what I’d ask right now, but sadly I’m constrained by the format of the blog, which omits the possibility of audience interaction. I suppose there is the comment, but in all honesty if you take the time to even read this, much less comment, I would hope you’d have more to say that ‘*raises hand’. But I digress. If I could actually see a show of hands, I imagine that I’d see many, if not most people raise their hand. Papers, projects, exams, life; it’s just a busy time of year. I have thoughts on ‘business’ but those are best saved for other notes. I think it’s overused as an excuse, but I’m not going to argue that right now. We are all busy. Fact.

Now compound that business with just general life. It could be just about enough to cause one to feel a bit overwhelmed. Relationships, schedules, church, questions, faith, sin, parents, children; life is just filled with intricacies and complexities. This is perhaps why I have found one of my latest taglines to be “life is complicated”. I don’t mean this statement to be negative necessarily. If life were not complicated, if would be rather boring really. The complexities of life are the very tool I believe God uses to shape us. Why else would we turn to God if we didn’t need some amount of help? In the end, my choice would still be for complexities, over straightforward clarity. Perhaps that sounds strange, but I know I grow so much in that. And trust me, I have had plenty of complex questions running through my head lately. They say every decade or so, you do a lot of question of your life, goals, accomplishments, etc. Twenty is just around the corner for me, so I guess I’m on schedule for such an evaluation. I wouldn’t describe any of it as bad by any means, but some of what I have been processing through lately has surprised me. My life isn’t looking exactly like what I thought it would a few years ago. Anyway, not to get off on the intricate details of my life, which I can barely even figure out; my point is that life seems especially full of questions right now. Not just the fuzzy, easy questions; the hard, major belief questions.

I would like to propose a paradox: Within the many questions and complexities of life, life is actually quite simple.

I was talking with a good friend of mine recently about life. In the conversation, the complexities of the changing world of friendships came up, among the other details of life. But as our conversation continued, an interesting point came up: life is really quite simple. Yes, it has many questions, but at the core, isn’t it pretty simple? We know we are loved by God, He has redeemed us, and we will spend Eternity with him. Not only does this truth cause many would-be complexities to seem irrelevant, but the remaining complexities simply point back to our faith. In a sense, life is quite simple because in the Christian walk there is a foundation of security. Life may be filled with questions, but they are temporal. In time, I venture that most will become clear. There is much more to life than these complexities, and though they may loom like thick, black clouds at times, the Truth that there is always a sky–even when we cannot see it–remains constant.

To focus on one area of my life right now, friendships, this is quiet applicable. I have a lot more complexities that just friendships, but I just want to focus on this one. I have been reflecting a lot lately on how much friendships changed. I think the group of people I spend the most time with at school changes from semester to semester, if not month to month. Not drastic changes, not bad changes, but it does change. Right now, I’m witnessing the transformation of my group of friends yet again. Perhaps it’s nothing major, but I see some friendships leaving the ‘spotlight’, others coming in, and still others just forming. It’s nothing bad at all, and exciting in many respects. God brings friends into our lives for different periods of time, and while not always easy to let go, it fits into His plan. Yet it is quite easy to hold on to those friendships tightly, and when they start to change, resent that change. But if i take a step back, remember God is in control, hold on to life with a light touch, those changes are far less important. And when you aren’t trying to hold things together when they seem to be crumbling around you, I think the discovery is that God was holding your life together far better than you were. We can only hold on to individual fragments of life, God can take those fragments and piece them together into something much greater.

I suppose this is yet another thing which I value about the “By Your Side” song. Yes, I keep bringing it up. I probably sound as though it’s the only thing I think about. Hardly. But every time I think I’ve moved on, it somehow returns to my life. In this pondering of simplicity, this song, yet again, returned to my thought life. It’s a simple song. It has a simple message. Yet, it holds a security that many, far more complicated and intricate songs don’t have. It’s the simple, quiet voice of God speaking through the complexities. God loves me; isn’t that enough?

So there is my latest in the thoughts of life. As with many things I’m ‘learning’ lately, I find that it isn’t really new at all. It’s something I’ve known all along, I think there may even be a blog or two on a very similar theme. Rather it is simply another facet of the same thing. It’s the manifestation of what was once a ‘new’ idea simply being observed in day-to-day life.

I guess my tagline is no longer ‘life is complicated; but life is good’ but rather ‘Life is so complicated that it has become simple.” It is the beauty of simplicity.