Simple Expectations
by Jared Johnson
You breathing normally after Christmas’s craziness yet?
We had quite the season in our house. Family get-togethers were good, we had an office party, our church had a “family worship night” on the 17th; it was a good season. It was our last season celebrating Christmas morning as the six of us in our nuclear family. Our kids are now getting old enough that next year, we’ll have to figure out multiple family unit schedules and compromises among them.
Our schedule this year felt kinda complicated. Presently, I’m listening to one version of the Bible while I simultaneously read along in a very different translation; that gets complicated. Tax season brings financial complication to all of us this time of year. We said goodbye to our perfect good boy mutt Socks last May (he was 13) and followed him up with a Great Pyrenees that’s now 7 months old and goooodness she makes things complicated.
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden possesses an enduring appeal, in part, no doubt, because he “went to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life…” A few years ago, we were hearing constantly about Marie Kondo and her simplicity-iciz-ifying ideas. I just glanced at her Wikipedia page, which claims her four books have sold millions of copies in several languages among 30 nations. Sounds complicated.
“Just the facts, ma’am” (for Boomers).
“Explain it to me like I’m 5” (for Millennials & Gen Z).
Obviously, we crave simple, but what a complicated world we inhabit.
One website claims a US Navy supercarrier has some one billion parts comprising it. We can’t even sneeze in the direction of a mechanic’s shop without being charged arms and legs, what with the hundreds of microchips that every car now has. Each person – and there are more than 8 billion of us – maintains roughly 150 relationships. Life’s complicated!
God has put us in an amazingly intricate creation. On the macro side:
We can see 13 or so billion light-years out from our planet (or 76,421,878,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles).
Our ball of rock and water weighs some 6.5 sextillion tons (6,583,200,000,000,000,000,000 tons; converted from NASA JPL figures), with 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water sloshing around on it, hurtling through space at something like 67,000mph relative to the sun.
The midsize, average star around which we spin can pump out 2,000,000,000-ton blobs of solar wind nigh-daily and its total mass doesn’t even change by a rounding error (not even 0.05% in 5 billion years by one calculation).
On the micro side of things:
The closest we can get to an “instant” is this fraction of a second: 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000539. (An eye blink lasts this long: 0.1 to 0.15 seconds.) God is in each and every “Planck Time” instant – and in the infinitesimally small “gaps” between them, gaps we can’t even describe with math.
His design is so minutely precise we can measure and predict, years in advance, how stars, planets, moons and even manmade satellites move down to seconds. We launched (by “we” I mean NASA) Pioneers 10 and 11 in the early 1970s. At about Uranus’s orbit, NASA noticed they were flying away from us slower than math had predicted. (Read more about that here and/or here.) It took years to find, analyze and hypothesize from NASA’s data archive, but an answer was found: photons and subatomic particles “evaporating” from their radioactive power cells were pushing backward against the spacecraft, slowing their progress ever so slightly. Those satellites each weighed about 570 pounds – and atoms changed their flights.
More than 8 billion people are alive right now. Billions more lived in the past. God knows every instant that every person experienced who has ever been conceived.
That’s a lot of complication swirling around us. How can we simplify?
As we keep all eyes on Jesus this year through the lens of spiritual disciplines, how can we distill all that complication, Jesus’s “all the books in the world” life? I can’t distill all that for you, but there are two verses, one Old Covenant and one New Covenant, that, to my ears, help me keep it simple.
“People, God’s told you what’s good. This is what He requires – do what’s right, love mercy, walk in humility with Him.” (Micah 6.8)
“You know God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power. Then Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with him.” (Acts 10.38, NLT)
It’s fascinating that in both instances, Scripture’s authors told their audiences “you already know this.” Micah told the political kingdoms of Judah and Israel “you were already told what God requires.” Peter told Cornelius’s household and friends “you already know Jesus’s ministry was full of power.” We crave simplicity and we can tap into that when we revisit what’s already happened, what’s already been demonstrated, what’s already known.
DO RIGHT
We do what’s right, even when it hurts. Psalm 15 lays out a concise description of an upright person and verse 4 uses that phrase. “Who may worship in your sanctuary, God? … Those who keep their promises, even when it hurts” (verses 1 and 4). Are you facing a situation tempting you toward expedience instead of what’s overtly right, ethical, and good in God’s eyes? That might be an application for you as the new year begins. We already know what He requires – do what’s right. Jesus went around doing good by always doing right.
LOVE MERCY
We love mercy, not punishment. It’s easy and, frankly, very worldly to relish punishment. Jesus released the woman caught in adultery. For a long time, I thought, “yeah but let the guy have it!” Had he been standing in front of Jesus in John 8.10-11, I’m now convinced He’d tell the dude to, likewise, uh, simmer down. “Do you think I like to see wicked people die? Of course not! I want them to turn from their wicked ways and live” (Ezekiel 18.23, NLT). God does not relish punishment. Snickering at someone else’s comeuppance, applauding “that bad guy got what he deserved” does not make us look like our Good Father. It makes us look like the accuser. That’s not to say consequences vanish. But enjoying someone getting punished, getting their comeuppance, and so on, is outright opposed to Micah 6.8. YouTube videos of “road rage karma,” and most social media generally, feed this kind of voyeurism with bucketfuls of ungodly delight. This might be your application. Set aside the need to see “bad guys get theirs.” We already know what He requires – love mercy. Jesus went around doing good in mercy.
WALK HUMBLY
While I want to know everything, I realized long ago that not only do I not know everything, I don’t even know enough to be dangerous. No sir – I only know enough to be annoying! Living with an attitude of humility will be different for each of us, but we can all spot the contrast between arrogance and humility in a nanosecond (well, in others we can). We might not need to straight-up repent from ourselves to do right or love mercy. But all of us can always be more humble! In humility, we set ourselves aside (Luke 9.23) to build up, support, encourage, and focus on others. Jesus went around doing good in perfect humility.
We already know what’s good, people. This is what our King requires, what our King Himself already demonstrated: do right, love mercy, walk humbly.
