A simple life. What is that? A simple life focuses on what is important, not on stuff that has no lasting value. A simple life doesn’t mean we aren’t busy. Busy is good if we are busy with the right things. If we decide to have a garage sale, what do we put in it? Stuff we don’t need and stuff we don’t use. Once a year, we rent a ten-yard dumpster. What do we throw in it? Stuff we don’t need, stuff we don’t use, and stuff that has no value. It is amazing to me how we can keep filling one of those dumpsters full every year; it’s like junk has babies. What is true of material things is also true of activities.

We add activities to our lives more easily than we add junk to our lives. The worthless activities have a mysterious power to take over our lives and complicate them, making them anything but simple. Even more difficult to control than worthless stuff and activities that accomplish little is what we think about. Our brains have a very strong tendency to pick up thought patterns that are like bad movies; they’re not even good entertainment, they just eat up time. There are a lot of negatives about growing old, most of them physical, but a major plus is that I value my time more than I ever have. Because I am getting to the end of my life, I want what time I have left to count. I have much more wisdom now about which activities will bear the most fruit in my life. Don’t spend time doing things that don’t matter. Time spent with God, becoming more like Him in character matters. Time spent with family and friends, influencing them to seek God, matters. Time spent teaching the Bible matters. Time spent building His church matters.