It’s all so complicated. This is life in a nutshell these days. Nothing is as simple as it seems and our stress levels only keep increasing. Something is always lurking beneath the surface, turning straightforward decisions into a complex series of calculus equations. Black and white have given way to grays, an overwhelming multitude of them. We are left to decipher and often we’re caught choosing bad from worse.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing…So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” — I Corinthians 13:1–3, 13

It’s the age old question. Seeing as Paul wrote this several centuries ago, we know the church has been having a simplification problem for a long, long time. In his God-given wisdom, Paul distilled it down as simply as can be done, so that we don’t have to continue in our stressful ways.

Cut it out! We’re killing ourselves for no reason. We put the strain of appearance and perception on the outpouring of our own God-given hearts. We are adulterating pure love that is bursting forth from our souls. We taint the natural spring of light gushing within us and are left with dirty, brackish expressions in which love is scarcely found.

We are Christ to the world. Christ was love and now we are His face, His hands and His feet. We cannot be these if we are not willing to submit fully and with abandon to His love. It’s a love that was bound by nothing but love for God and love for His neighbor. His love abided only in love. Likewise, our love is to also.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. All these people stressed out around me are stressing me out and I was already stressed to begin with. You see, it’s contagious. While it’s contagious, it doesn’t have to be chronic. We’ve got the answer to a weighty question, now it’s time to drop the rocks we’ve been carrying for so long. It’s time to lighten our loads and just love. We’ll find that in the process we’re also just living as life is love. We must first get out of our heads, past the fact that it’s all so complicated.