Less

Less.

I have been thinking about less.  Just letting the word hang out in my brain and see what it has to offer me.  To teach me.

I guess I began to focus on it when someone talked about picking a word for the year. That seemed like a good idea, but I don't know that I would make it work nor that I want to mess with having a word for the year. But still I remind myself of the word "less" sometimes because it seems like a good word.

Less is a good idea.

We have been seriously downsizing for three years. It has been crazy. Much has changed, I have been letting go of things until it hurts, but there is still too much stuff.

Less is good.

On several levels of my brain and my heart, I am convinced that I prefer less to more, but it is still so hard to get there. The process is excruciating and exhausting.  So I focus on the benefits, on the idea of less - and how liberating it is.

Less is good.

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This actually makes me think of a sermon at Brown City Camp many years ago by Dave Engbrecht - about things he had chosen not to be good at. I don't remember many of the things on his list, but I do remember the prinicple he explained by saying that he was unwilling to invest the time and money and energy to be good at certain things (like playing golf, for example) because he knew that if he decided to make that investment, other things would suffer. That important people or projects would end up getting the leftovers of his resources.

I suppose that the idea appealed to me so much because I must have been getting a little weary of the quest for more.  I had always been such a pleaser and so submissive to all those other sermons. The ones that told me I must excel in this and that and everything imaginable. That I must do more. Pray more. Read my Bible more. Give more. Serve more. Be more patient. More faithful. More zealous.  Have more passion and more compassion. Be committed to excellence and success and striving. Always striving. Bah! I am so sick of striving. Where is the good news in that?

More, more, more.

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And of course, it wasn't just at church that I heard about more. Pretty much everywhere we turn, "more" is the measure of success.  It's not enough to keep up with the Joneses; now we need more than they have.  Certainly more than we already have. More than we need. More than enough.

Oh wait, then there was that whole other sermon about "more than enough." To hear the guy tell about it that weekend and to read his book, we should not be satified with enough. Nope, we serve a God who provides more than enough - so why would we settle for only enough?  Good grief.  Somehow he made it sound good at the time, but it was just one more of the unhealthy things I swallowed.

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And what about advertising and commercials that are all geared to convince us that we need more?  What a crock.

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Where is the call for less? That's what I think I need. Certainly less food. Less stuff. Less toys.

Sometimes less is a good idea.

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Maybe that's why this article caught my attention - this list of things we could do less.  Great ideas. Several from this list jump out at me as being really good places to start in my quest for less.

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Oh dear; now there are a bunch more ideas flitting through my brain, so many more things to write about, but I think I'll stop right here. 

With less words rather than more.