Real. Simple.

I love Real Simple magazine. I really don't think that much of Martha Stewart, but credit's due where it's due. She knows how to hire some amazing editors, designers, writers, and photographers. Boom. Fantastic magazine.

As I was agog and flipping through the beautiful and friendly articles in the October issue last night, it occurred to me that one of the things that made the magazine attractive was its emphasis on, well, simplicity. They sell the idea that life isn't as complicated as we make it, that you can have more fun if you try to not be perfect all the time.

A great message, if a little far-fetched when they're selling alongside the "real simple" message, the $50 lip gloss, the $300 dress, and the couch that most of us couldn't afford even if we gave up our paychecks for the next year.

But perhaps I digress. Their main message is a good one and bears hearing by many of us, most of us, I'd say. Keep life simple. It's more fun that way.

The message of real simplicity came up in a different way while I was at school yesterday, talking with a student who has come back to school after some 30-40 years of other life experience.We got to talking about her church, or rather the overgrown Bible study that makes her church. She said it's full of hobos and homeless people, famous names and middle-aged has-beens. But they all come to hear about grace.

"I think sometimes we complicate church so much, " she said earnestly, sighing in her former-smoker husky voice. "And I got so tired of being busy. So I go there and think about Christ; that's all it's about anyway."

She told me about her mother who weeps over the soul-weary, worldly-exhausted members who come, looking for rest. "I wish I was as tender as my mother," she smiled, "But yeah, we go, and she reminds us it's all about Him. She prays that anything she says or does will just fall away."

As we continued talking, my cheeks flushed slightly, knowing how guilty that I am, as a sometimes-academic and writer, how I love to complicate things in order to sound smart, to sound superior. To give myself an identity.

God is complex, Christ is deep, to be sure, but He is also so simple. "Come," He says. That's all.

After I thought about our conversation, after I flipped through my suspiciously named Real Simple magazine, it led me to pray a little differently this morning. I talked to God about my ability, and even sometimes my desire, to complicate Him., thereby making myself the point of reference, rather than Him. I tried to pray as Flannery O'Connor would pray, that I could get out of the way so that He would work through me more. And I remembered it's so much simpler that way.