Life has a way of getting seriously complicated. In fact, it kind of stays seriously complicated. I’m getting ready to start yet another semester, which means that I’m basically not going to have time to breathe for the next 4 months or so.
I was talking to a friend on the phone just a few minutes ago. Talk about getting slammed…life just nailed him in a big way. Almost makes me feel bad about thinking anything was wrong in my life, because I don’t have anything going on that can touch his. But I’ve just been spending time thinking lately about how complicated and screwed up things can get, and it occurred to me a couple of days ago that, all too often, we make them that way. Like, we almost go out of our way to make things more complicated than it should be.
I think that’s why religion irritates me so much. We’ve taken something very basic, very real, and very attainable, and we’ve turned it into something elitist, something snobbish. I hate that. The farther I move toward my master’s, the more bogged down I get in these abstract theological concepts that just make things a lot more complex than they should be. Honestly, I think they rob us of the closeness that we should have with God, the spiritual depth that we should have to our lives, because we’re so busy worrying about all this other stuff. And to be totally honest, I think that we’re gonna get to Heaven, and God’s gonna slap us all in the head and tell we were all wrong anyway. He’s going to tell us that we all got really hung up on things that don’t matter. I don’t know if I want to say that theology is useless, but it’s close. In case, it’s definitely overdone.
I’ve really been impressed lately with how basic it is. He died for us. He wants us to accept that. Then He wants us to tell others about it. That’s not difficult. That’s not theological. That’s just true. Basic, easy to understand, not difficult or wrapped up in technicalities. Just real. I think He wants us to get back to basics. I think He wants us to stop making things so difficult, and just do this.
Really, it’s kind of nice to think that maybe life shouldn’t be so complicated, isn’t it?