As some of us begin to take a hard look at our finances, be it personally or corparately, it seems fitting to look into the testimony of simplicity and our faith for guidance.
In 1985 Frances Irene Tabor wrote "It may come as a surprise to some of us that the first generation of Friends did not have a testimony of simplicity. They came upon a faith, which cut to the root of the way they saw life, radically reorienting it. They saw that all they did must flow directly from what they experienced as true, and that if it did not, both the knowing and the doing became false. In order to keep the knowledge clear and the doing true, they stripped away anything which seemed to get in the way. They calle dthose things superfluities, and it is the radical process of stripping for clear-seeing which we now term simplicity."
Perhaps, as we look at our circumstance and our need to redirect our resources, we should look to that which gets in the way of our directly experieceing our faith and our families. Perhaps, like Dr. Suess's, Gertrude McFuzz we have accumulated so many tail feathers, we are unable to fly. And as Gertrude found out, the cure is a painfully process of plucking those tail feathers until we are again free of what encumbers us.
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How can 3 paragraphs cover so much...
ReplyDeleteSometimes even simplifying for a few minutes can be real treat. Just try to remove all that extra stuff that's flittering around in your brain and take a few moments to think of nothing.
Simple living is an act that grows as the years pass. We start out wanting to be a grown up rushing to expand only to witness the burdon of trying to keep up. Then we wake up to the fact that living, loving and caring is what we need to find the peace within.
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