Its 11:35pm, on December 2nd.

I made the commitment to post a reflection every day leading up to Christmas, and already, after just 2 days, I am up against the clock. How? What?

Its ironic then, that the advent gift I had already chosen for day 2, was…

The gift of SIMPLICITY.

My life has been anything but simple today.

Truth be told, my life is rarely simple.

As human beings, living in America, in 2016, simplicity is just not something we know how to do. Everything we hear and see every day, is pressuring us to do more, go faster and drive harder. We measure our success by our level of activity, not the quality of our activity. The result, is the rat race that is American society. Keep performing, keep climbing, keep, keeping up.

Everything we understand about life in our world today screams the opposite of simplicity.

And then there is the Christmas story. The story of the birth of Jesus. The most significant event in human history. God, made flesh, living among the very things and people He Himself spoke into existence. Breathing our air, walking our soil… or is it his soil? His air? Yeah, it’s His air.

This story, is laced with simplicity, clothed in stillness, and screams humility.

This story, the most unbelievable story every lived, can only be described as…

SIMPLE.

Babies are simple… All they do is eat, poop and Cry. This is the context God chose to enter our world

The town of Bethlehem… Small, humble, barely on the map

Jesus earthly father, Jospeh… A craftsman, working with his hands to make ends meet

A Virgin… pure, innocent, untouched.

Everything about this holy night was designed with simplicity in mind. Heck, the first people to find out about the birth of the greatest king that would ever live, was a group of dirty, smelly, insignificant shepherds.

So what about us then?

Are we willing to go about our lives as usual? Are we willing to chalk up the complexity of our lives to a cultural normality?

The craziest thing of all, is that most of us who claim to worship this infant King Jesus, gladly and enthusiastically admit that the season set aside to celebrate Him is, in fact, our most complex season of all.

What? How? It SIMPLY shouldn’t be so…

Have we really missed it that badly?

Jesus, instead of filling my Advent with more, give me the courage to engage with less. Instead of scurrying from one thing to the next give me the wisdom to stop, to slow down, and to simplify.

The story of Advent gifted us the freedom to value SIMPLICITY, even when our world is screaming for complexity…

May we choose to embrace the gift of SIMPLICITY as we count down the days to the celebration of our dear saviors birth, and rest in the gift of less.