Simple

It is fall, the air is beginning to turn, the sky so crisp and clear. After a week of aches, allergies, and Indian Summer, we collapse into Friday night--puppy pile on the couch to watch an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" on our computer screen(TV now relegated to the "children's living room/play room/den" upstairs-a room not yet furnished.)

Life is still tight and constrained in many ways--work, school, bills, deadlines and commitments. But I cherish the simple times with my family. Thursday was Back to School night; tomorrow we'll be making apple pies. So much of our days are paperwork and planned that we can start to believe that that paradigm is life. It's a framework that spills into our free time, and if no one offers us a new one, we get stuck in scheduling our play.

Watching a show like "Little House" I remember-- "'Tis a gift to be simple". Hard work by hand, generosity, sacrifice, community are values a family shares. I wonder if these might also be values that a church can teach, and if there are stories we can tell with our lives. Too often, I feel that the paradigm my congregation offers is simply a mirror of the greater culture-- of busy, busy, busy without really getting to the heart of 'why'. While there are individual examples of simplicity and generosity, this is not modeled in congregational life. There exists this gap between a time fatigued leadership--and a membership that is disengaged. Even on Sunday morning, a consumerist model prevails.

It does not need to be this way; we are at a juncture where things must either change--or break. There are too many who desire more; they desire to be asked for more-- not more time or money, but more of their lives. We are tired of the rat race and want to find a new way to live together, on this earth. A church can provide the model for a new, simpler way of life.

Families need support. We need help to live a simpler way-- not to return to the days of carriages and saddles, but to recreate our lives in the modern era with those "old-fashioned" values of generosity and community support central. We like a little modernity mixed in. But what we long for is support to help us make more time, in a world of DVDs and facebook, falling leaves and apple pie.