Bare Necessities

One of my 3-year old son's favorite movies is Jungle Book. In that movie, there is a song called The Bare Necessities. Being the strange person that I am, I tend to analyze and think about lyrics to almost every song I hear.

God seems to be reinforcing an old message to me in many ways: simplify, simplify, simplify. I just finished reading a book called Simple Church. This book makes the claim- backed up by research- that churches with simple processes and purposes grow. Most churches stagnate because they get caught up in doing good things. But those things distract the focus and the church becomes ineffective as a result. The same is true in business. As Clint Eastwood said in a Dirty Harry film, "A man has to know his limitations."

The last verse of The Bare Necessities reads:

And don't spend your time lookin' around
For something you want that can't be found
When you find out you can live without it
And go along not thinkin' about it
I'll tell you something true
The bare necessities of life will come to you

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature's recipes
With just the bare necessities of life

We have a tendency to make life more complex than is necessary don't we? I was struck by a fact that was released over the weekend. The United States is arguably the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation in the world. But our life expectancy is 42nd among nations. This means 41 nations have longer life expectancies for their citizens than the US. There are reasons for this: overindulgence and stress would be high on my suspect list.

I am beginning to re-evaluate everything in my life (again) with the goal of returning to a more strategic simplicity. Ecclesiastes 7:29, "God has made man simple; but man seeks out many complexities."

I am thinking about the implications for stewardship. I feel called to make whole-life stewardship my purpose in life. My vision is to help others make progress in becoming better stewards of money, abilities, time and health in order that God would be glorified through a transforming life.

My method for promoting this has been too complex. I have encouraged clients and friends to set goals for making progress in stewardship. Some have participated in this exercise. The focus or lack of focus I should say has been on setting a large amount of stewardship goals- somewhere between 10-25. What has happened in my own life is that this number is way too large to focus on and therefore accountability to these goals has been low.

My renewed simple concentration is to set four goals for making progress in daily stewardship of the Lord's resources. One goal for each letter in the MATH acronym (Money, Abilities, Time and Health). These goals will be my focus for six months. Hopefully, at the end of six months they will become such entrenched habits that I can move on to another set of four goals. But if they are not, I will continue with these original goals until they become part of my daily life.

Soren Kierkegaard said, "Define your life forward and live it backwards." We all need a transformation process to shoot for. The Lord is in the transformation business. Paul says, "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day Christ returns"- Philippians 1:6.

The goals of every Christian should be:

1. Deeper understanding and relationship with God (Father, Son, Spirit).
2. A transformed life into the image of Christ.
3. A commitment to the mission of God to redeem others. We are to be ambassadors for His kingdom on earth as it is and will be in heaven.

We make it more complicated than it should be. Everything else is noise. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

For His Glory,

Ashley Hodge