The simple things are often complex by Stewart Perry
Have you ever found yourself longing for simpler times when life was a lot less complex? Or maybe you just want things to be simple in general because so much that is going on in our world is so complicated.
I’ll often hear people reflect in a nostalgic way on the past with words like: “life was so much simpler then”. But recently I’ve begun to wonder whether life has ever been that simple. I think we have a way, when we look back at our past, to block out some of the complexities and I certainly think that when I was younger I was much more naive to those complexities.
As much as I look back at my adolescent formative years in the 1980’s and remember the fun and joy of friends and lack of responsibilities and commitments, if I were to take a closer look at those times, I’d remember that it was the last stages of the Cold War with the threat of Nuclear devastation, there was record youth unemployment and we weren’t sure we’d ever get a job and like most teenagers I was trying to work out who I was and battling insecurities… that doesn’t sound very simple does it?
The “simple things in life” are often much more complex than they appear. In many cases for something to be simple, a lot of work has to go into it, a lot of trial and error, learning from mistakes, research or development. Take most of our “simple” technologies for example. How much complexity is behind me simply making a phone call on my handheld device?
There is so much going on at the moment that I’d love to be able to give you a simple answer for, but to do so wouldn’t seem to do the situation justice. In my role as a minister and leader in the Church, I’ve found over the years that people will often look to me to make sense out of the complex, to give simple answers, to explain hard situations… I suspect I rarely, if ever, meet those expectations, as much as I like to think of myself as a good problem solver.
It’s not always as simple as I’m right and they’re wrong. There is not always a True/False answer. What it we’re both right… what if we’re both wrong… what if we’re both right and wrong. Do you have to be wrong for me to be right?
I wonder if, at least part of our desire for the simple times or the simple answer is so we can move on to the next thing and not deal with it any more. I wonder if our desire to be right says more about ourselves and our insecurities than it does about the situation we have an opinion about. I wonder if we crave simple answers because we don’t want to deal with the messiness of complexity.
Have you ever noticed that when Jesus is asked a direct question, he rarely gives a direct or simple answer? He will often respond with another question or a story or parable. I’ve never tried but I suspect that if you tallied up all of Jesus’s “simple answers” to questions he was asked in the gospels, it wouldn’t be a very long list.
So why then do we as the church, as individuals not only crave simple answers but also regularly offer them?
Instead I wonder if we should, as Jesus did, seek deeper questioning, wrestle with the messiness of complexity and turn away from self-righteousness.
I could list a number of polarising issues we are facing at the moment… I won’t because they are polarising, but you know the types of things I’m thinking of. We could all right a big long list. Instead I want to encourage you to respond to them the way Jesus did. To ask further questions, to tell stories of what you’ve heard, not to pass judgement or express opinion but to cause yourself and others to think deeply. Not to necessarily seek a simple answer or determine what is right or wrong, instead become more comfortable in the messiness of complexity… for it is there where we find and build relationship… and it’s often in the messiness of complexity that we can witness the power of God at work.
Wrestle well!