“When we fritter away our one and only life doing things that don’t really matter, we sacrifice the things that do matter.”- Bill Hybels
Simplify: Ten Practices to Unclutter Your Soul is the latest book by Bill Hybels, founding and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL. Pastor Hybels coaches and mentors leaders all over the world. In his travels he hears the same words repeated over and over: exhausted, overwhelmed, overscheduled, anxious, isolated, dissatisfied.
The author emphasizes he has no closely held secret to overcoming those issues or has proceeded well beyond them in his own experience. Pastor Hybels has spent most of his adult life wrestling with those same issues. He is a serious fellow learner on the topic of simplifying our lives. He offers his definition of simple living:
“Simple living is about more than doing less. It’s being who God called us to be, with a whole hearted, single-minded focus. It’s walking away from innumerable lesser opportunities in favor of the few to which we’ve been called and for which we’ve been created. It’s a lifestyle that allows us . . . to reflect with gratitude that our day was well invested and the varied responsibilities of our lives are in order.”
Pastor Hybels concludes that if we don’t simplify our lives, our overcomplicated world will begin to feel frighteningly normal. As John Ortberg comments on Simplify:
“No one can truly impact a complex, broken outer world if they do not have a simple, healthy inner world.”
Today’s question: Which of Pastor Hybels six descriptors apply to you? Please share.
Coming Monday: the Annotated Bibliography of All the Places to Go
Tomorrow’s blog: “Needless clutter”
