Back to Basic

James 4:13-14 says, "Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."

It is a lovely command, but how many of us live this way?

At one point, we didn't. We played because that was our only task for the day. We would wake up, locate our mental goal-setting list, and on it would be one goal: play.

No strings attached, no extra form to sign. In fact, you don't even need to know your past play periods to achieve the only goal on the mental card. The one issue: you would have to play all day. In your pea-sized mind, summer days did not allow any other activities to intrude your eternal time to play. Your time to shine was the summers of elementary school and even some of secondary school as well. Constructing family room fortresses out of furniture, eating grilled cheese while watching cartoons, Capture the Flag on the outskirts of the house, and rolling Hot Wheels cars down the driveway to see which car "out-drove" the other ones.

Life as a kid was fun and literally full of two responsibilities: to play and be happy.

Now, life is a tangled web of strings, never to be fully untwisted and perfectly positioned until the seconds before you whisper your last breaths. Sometimes, the metaphors of life ("you are a warrior fighting in the battlefield of life," etc.) don't do much of anything in comparison to the truth of reality. As you start making your job your life, along with a million other responsibilities, being "the warrior" does not seem as pleasant as it used to be.

Soon, the idea of a heavenly ham dinner sounds tremendously delicious...almost eternally delicious if I dare cross the line and say so.

Then, it occurs to you. The smallest detail motivates you. Whether it is the struggling student suddenly bursts with joy, "I get it," or solving the puzzle of how to become positive in a negative world. Suddenly, the most minuscule crumb becomes a harvest. You look at the crumb and are so hungry for change, for motivation, that you are more content than ever just to taste 1/3 of the crumb.

Yet, the quantity is not what matters, but how much farther you can go with the piece.

Ever hear of the phrase, "you have to take a step backward in order to take two forward"?
Well, this is the perfect analogy. Life sometimes gets too complicated to fit any passion in. Sometimes, we have to take some time to go back to the start and re-run the race. As the gun goes off prematurely, the blast telling us to go even when we are not ready, we need to turn around and regroup so we can restart the race properly. We need to focus on the simple things in order to accomplish the tough things.

Sometimes, to finish the race strong, we need to start over and over until we know full well how to finish. It is through our weakness we are made strong, and our mistakes when we learn along. But sometimes, it is our weakness and our mistakes that take us all the way back to the start so we can realize what is truly important.

"It's not where you start," said Zig Ziglar, "it's where you finish that counts." Ah, thank you for the wonderful clairification Z. It helps to know someone has an idea.

So, if you have no place to run and the fear of growing out of the family room fortresses and homemade lemonade from mom, just smile and think, "it's where you finish that counts."

Or as Paul says, "I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace. (Acts 20:24)." Sure, this guy is thinking ahead, but he is going back to the simplicity of living: the fact that it means nothing. Just finishing the race. Sounds a lot less stressful and painful as life really is. But, how much motivation are we going to have if we always look at life the complicated way - the way where we think about what we have to do rather than what we've already done?

Yes, don't give up and keeping working toward the future. Still, we need to stop and reflect every so often and go back to why we are doing what we do - and what makes us do what we do.

As complicated as life is, we have the gift of choosing to simplify by going back and continually learning the simple lessons to help us through the toughest.

Don't ever think going back to the basics is ever not worth it.
It is.
Trust me.
It keeps things basic.