He was four years old . . . barely. Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living. He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life. I love Corey. I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not. He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life. Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy...
He was four years old . . . barely. Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living. He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life. I love Corey. I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not. He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life. Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy of life and expels it freely out to anyone who will embrace its gift. He is both a repository of living and the embodiment simplicity. One without the other would dramatically diminish him, as it would any of us.
“I have seventy cents,” he said. Sitting at a red light, I had no idea as to the nature, purpose or rationale of his comments, arising it seemed from the incessant babbling and spontaneity that frequently marks him. “Dad, I have seventy cents.” Attending to the blur and bustle of the marauding traffic that rushed around me, I attempted to placate him, hoping that he would drift on to something else. “That’s nice,” I replied. He was irritably insistent. My verbal pabulum was blatantly insufficient for him. “Dad, I have seventy cents!” His voice was emphatic. I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched him squirming in his car seat, obviously possessing some agenda of great importance to him that was swallowed up in the supposedly greater agendas that dictated my day. Catching my eyes in the mirror, he held out a clenched fist clutching seventy cents and with sordid determination said, “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
What We Miss
I am occupied, attending to the congestion and myriad events around me. The traffic of my life is made up of frustrating red lights, a rare green one, and irritating yellows that flash across a myriad of my intersections. All of the congestion of commerce and career, the snarls of success and the raucous rhythm of rush hour that I embrace as essential and necessary to achievement.
I am caught in the blindness of believing that living life means winning, being horrified that an opportunity missed is an unredeemable loss that creates a permanent setback and lifetime diminishment. I must master life by gouging and gorging myself on its complexities at every opportunity, without having time to savor the tender exquisiteness of its intricacies. Mine is a hoarding of life, rather than a delicate sampling. In and through it all I miss the minute details in the mayhem, the subtleties that are the very essence of the larger things that I gorge and feed upon. In essence, I miss simplicity. “I have seventy cents Dad!” It was a statement of simplicity, and so I missed it.
Crystal blue eyes and romping blonde hair, his small hands cradled two quarters and two precarious dimes. They were clenched so firmly that his tiny fingers turned shades of red and white; holding them valiantly in front of him with arms outstretched. His face was chiseled with a squared hint of boyish determination, the manifestation of four year old eyes apprehending the core of life and living when I could not see it. His perceived with a crystal clear soul what really mattered when all I saw was an annoying red light and thick traffic. “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
And then I saw it. Quite accidently it caught the barest edge of my mind. Out of the corner of my eye, from the farthest fringes of my life it stirred. The simple intruded upon my chosen world of complexities. A solitary figure sat on the margins of my wild world, passing by me except for a four year old attuned to the wonder of simplicity, hoping that the din surrounding me might ebb just enough to catch a glimpse. I finally saw it.
Scrawled by an unsteady hand across a tattered piece of discarded cardboard, stained and bent were a handful of words. The edges of cardboard were torn, frayed and mutilated, much like the man who held it. It was stained and bent. Primitive letters etched out the silent plea of a lost life. He was no more than ten feet away, and I missed him. The sign read, “Need help, please.” “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
Simplicity Missed and Reclaimed
“Don’t push these children away.” Jesus’ voice was purposeful, highlighting an eternal principal violated by stumbling men who chased after life and missed living in the pursuit of living. “Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are the very center of life in the kingdom” (Mark 10:14, The Message). Simplicity is central to the infinite, which is an odd and incomprehensible dichotomy. That which is complex beyond comprehension embraces simplicity at its core and derives all that it is from that core. The infinite invites us to simplicity as that which is of eternal value is best seen in that which is simple and uncluttered.
Simplicity is the key that turns the tumblers to the door of the eternal. It is the single and sole passport to an audience with the infinite. We must suspect then that such a concept is built into the fabric of the finite as well. Simplicity is the essence of life and living from which all else springs. Without it complexity loses it roots, it has no grounding, no boundaries and no identifiable point of departure that defines it and shapes it. And it is here, with the cluster of children swirling around Him in innocent admiration that Jesus declares simplicity as simply central.
The Pharisees and their malicious attempts to trap Him were barely hours old, still resonating in His mind. God incarnate, the Creator of the universe had been asked to justify Himself. It was indeed the absurdity that arises when simplicity is missed. The rich young ruler and the stench of materialism were only moments away. Face to face with God, the rich young man would prove himself unable to see Jesus in the tangled web woven of wealth and the complexity inherent in the sordid accumulation of power. He had too much of this world and too little of the next; all of which leaves no room for simplicity. The walk to Jerusalem, betrayal, spikes, a splintered beam, oozing blood, death . . . all of that was only a mere handful of days away. Awash in the many manifestations of man’s sin and on the threshold of abolishing it, Jesus “gathered the children up in His arms and He laid His hands of blessing on them” (Mark 10:16, The Message).
Simplicity Lived
As you look at this picture of Jesus, do you see it? It too is on the margins of our lives, sadly so. Jesus is sitting, gingerly drawing an armful of giggling and squealing children into His lap. The thick hands of a carpenter run calloused fingers through mounds of curls gracing a tiny head, drawing a smile out of a timid child with a playful and slightly bemused stare. Embracing their innocence and simplicity as so far removed from the world He faces, the world that He will die for.
He sees in their impish and innocent faces the simplicity that keeps the world from seeing Him. He is at the vortex of His earthly life. In a matter of days all of history will be rocked by His death. The universe will itself reel. Hell will fall. Satan will flee. The immensity of the powers of darkness will suffer complete and uncompromising defeat. He will defiantly tread the bowels of Hell itself and then He will rise and He will, in His resurrection, change the entire course of human history for the full course of human history. What He is about to do is monumental beyond anything that has ever transpired in the whole course of existence.
But here, at this moment, sandwiched between these cataclysmic events, He laughs with children who have no sense of Who He is, or what awaits Him. But, innocent they are. And so He plays for a moment. He tickles and gets tickled. He tells a joke and the air is filled with the squeal of childhood laughter. Eye to eye with gentle intensity He tells them of their immense value and of a Father’s love for each of them. He will die for them shortly, their innocence maybe making that sacrifice more bearable and more compelling.
It is the Creator connecting through simplicity with the created in a way that is entirely unabated and unobstructed. It is the treasure of the deep soul finding connection with the vast God through the conduit of simplicity. The mayhem of life’s traffic, all of the red and green and yellow lights that had dogged His ministry were laid aside so that He could immerse Himself in life’s real purpose.
The Door of Access
From this adoring pile of romping children His gaze shifted, directing his words to the twelve standing about the scene. It was not to be a lesson for children, but one from them. Tussling with their youthful energy, He says, “Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in” (Mark 10:15, The Message). The contrast is numbing, even paralyzing. The key to complexity is simplicity? But how can simplicity ever hope to grasp complexity? Simplicity would suggest intentional ignorance through the abandonment of the acquisition of knowledge. It was a stunning and completely puzzling reversal.
The complexities of life and living, the minute intricacies of the Law and the sacrificial system, the unfathomable breadth of the cosmos and starry hosts that beg exploration and contemplation, the mysterious yet striking predictability of nature, the grandeur and the magnificent majesty of God as the incomprehensible “I AM” (Genesis 3:14, NIV) next to which all of creation fades and pales into oblivion is accessed through simplicity? Here, in the laughter and play of these children laid the incalculably priceless key to kingdom access and the sole passport to the infinite? It was simply too simple, so simple that grasping it was, in itself, complex.
Peals of laughter drew them back from contemplation, being a sweet elixir to a sullen life. They were the voices of those who had seized the keys to the kingdom through simplicity. Accepting as these children accepted, with innocence and simplicity, humility and obedience, through trust that never asks if there is anything else other than trust. Engaging in a raw embracing, a simple acceptance free of attempts to determine how to shape one’s life so that it might find a shred of acceptability before God. Freely accepting the unconditional as exactly that . . . unconditional. And so it was in the children.
Jesus stood, the lesson now having been taught by example and by word. He stooped, placed His hands on the children for a brief final moment and blesses them, extending into their simplicity the blessing of God. He was able to do so because of the massive and free-roaming space created in and by their simplicity. Access to the kingdom was granted to such as these, its evidence seen in the blessing. It was all so simple, yet so magnificently transforming. Lives have expended lifetimes trying to achieve what these children achieved in but a moment via the vehicle of innocence and simplicity.
A final hug, a parting embrace and the children dispersed, running into the arms of waiting parents. A pair of them skipped off holding hands. Sticks trailed curlicue designs in the gritty dirt. Several ran around parents in errant circles of delight and innocent mischief. A small cluster gathered mounds of wildflowers, pressing their nectared petals deep into their faces, inhaling their perfumed ecstasy. The sound of laughter faded and then dissipated on the soft winds of the day. The bevy of children scurried off to the next adventure, not realizing that they had just had the greatest adventure of all. But simplicity embraces all life as an adventure.
Getting Back
A honking horn exploded into the moment. The light was green. I instinctively punched the accelerator and drove off. “But Dad, I have seventy cents!” How our hearts are drawn to simplicity, yet how difficult it is for us to allow it to remain so; how painful when we cannot respond to it. Life caused me to drive by him, and to do this day I am irritated by that action. Corey and I talked about that man, and we talked about how we could help someone with his seventy cents; seventy cents of simplicity. Could I please have seventy cents of simplicity! Enough to see my world like Corey does. Oh God, could you please grant me seventy cents of simplicity!
How Do I Find Seventy Cents of Simplicity?
How do I balance complexity with simplicity? How do I rectify the God of the universe playing with children and incorporate that principal into my world? How do I correlate the melding of the infinite and simplicity? Where is that common ground where I can embrace simplicity with a relentless vigor and yet live in a world of complexity?
It is not the absence of complexity, for creation is woven of it and it is the embodiment of God Himself. It is the example of the infinitely complex God playing and romping with simple children that we must seize, hold fast to and draw from. The key is the full embodiment of both simplicity and complexity where neither is lost or sacrificed at the expense of the other, but where the complete embrace of both brings fullness and balance to life. The challenge is to hold to both equally. We assume that complexity is the absence of simplicity. Rather, is complexity not the very thing that highlights simplicity and makes simplicity so very obvious and so deeply cherished? Is it not in the holding of simplicity that complexity has a point of origin and a benchmark which dictates it shape, tenor and tone? And is not the fullest embrace of the two, with each holding the other in balance the very thing that maximizes life and living?
We need to live with seventy cents of simplicity, clutching it in our fists and refusing to let it go. Allowing it to hold and ground our exploration, acquisition and understanding of life’s complexities. It is our task to apprehend an understanding of the world God has put us in, but to likewise to maintain eyes of simplicity that keep us centered on that which is central to all of life. Complexity that is not continually grounded in simplicity is apt to be errant, causing us to be consumed in the complexity itself. For that brief moment, following a confrontation with the Pharisees, a pending confrontation with a rich young ruler, and only days away from death, Jesus centered Himself in simplicity. So should we.
Pondering Point
“I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (John 10:10, The Message). Could it be that this “more and better life” is in part the ability to embrace complexity while holding tenaciously to simplicity, allowing simplicity to ground us and center us in the complicated and detailed facets of life; each providing a balancing effect for the other, thereby allowing us to embrace the fullness of life without sacrificing anything that a single focus would cause us to miss? And is such a balance the work of God in our lives, His grace and power allowing us to achieve this dual embrace? Indeed, I think it is.
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