As a Lutheran, I hear the phrase law & gospel quite frequently. One of the great things that is happening because of our experiment is a wrestling with “the law” that we’ve created for ourselves. Many thanks to those of you who have challenged our “list of rules” as being contradictory to the simple life. You’ve given us good points to think about and they have been great conversation starters for us along our journey. One of the things I am beginning to realize is that God gave us “the law” in order to help us truly live. The rules set before us were meant to be guidelines to help us not get caught up in the junk and to help us to focus on our relationship with God. The difficulty is figuring out a balance between the law and true simplicity.
When D & I first began to talk about this experiment, one of the questions I noted in my journal was this:
Will this list of rules that we decide upon create more complexity than simplicity? Will it be a way to obsessively control something in our lives or will it liberate us more than we could possibly imagine?
And then I read Chapter 4 in Present Perfect. I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole idea that we operate on autopilot. We are so conditioned to buy everything that society tells us we need. Perhaps some of you are more disciplined than I, but I have a really hard time not buying silly stuff (like dvds, or shoes, or Starbucks coffee). It’s particularly worse when I watch a lot of TV, because all the latest commercials tell me just how outdated my MacBook is or how much cooler I might be if I had the newest style of sandals. So yes – a list of do’s and don’ts could certainly create complexity, but I’m convinced that in order to get to true simple living, I need the list to help me realize what life will be like without those things.
However, we do realize that we aren’t perfect people. We know we’re gonna screw up during this project, and it is highly likely that there will be more epic fails than there are epic wins. The truth of the matter is we hope that we can ditch the list of do’s and don’ts at the end of our experiment because we have tasted the goodness of simple living and no longer need a list to go buy.
Ah – the taste of the simple life.
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I think the question of being a slave to things was a good way to describe it. Are the rules a way of controlling the process or a way to help you identify what might be controlling you and preventing the simple focused life?