July 21, 2019
Recently I attended the funeral of a man who impacted my life when I was a university student. He was a professor (not mine) but also a Sunday School teacher (mine.)
Pericles said “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Two aspects of his life were expressed this way:
Dick wanted to help every person he met to learn, improve, and grow.
God was the Central Organizing Focus of all that he did.
Dick lived a life with many pursuits, interests, and accomplishments. Yet his COF helped him to embrace simplicity.
We often think that a life of simplicity would mean “getting away from it all” and perhaps riding a bike into the hills to live at a monastery!
But someone said that simplicity is keeping emotional, spiritual values at the top of our focus and all of our other concerns way below. The concerns of daily life are real, but if we give them equal emotional weight with our top values, then simplicity eludes us.
