Happy Mother’s Day, I think. This can be a complicated day for some who breathe a sigh of relief once the restaurants have emptied and the social posts have died down.

Life is full of complicated relationships.

Take my relationship with a new soup recipe. I read it, re-read it and looked at it again, and finally exclaimed to the recipe, “Why didn’t you just tell me to make a roux?” A roux is simply equal parts fat (butter in my case) and flour that is then cooked until it reaches the shade you want. The recipe had taken something simple and turned it into a complicated process (I suspect it was to avoid using the word “roux.”)

There’s something in us that wants to make things more complicated than they are. We’ve been doing it since the beginning. God said, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.” (Gensis 2:16, 17) With a nudge from the Ancient of Lies, Eve turned a clear command from God into a complicated relationship that infested the ground with thorns and human hearts with sin.

God said you shall have no other gods before me; his people built a golden calf. Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost; the Pharisees thought they were neither lost nor in need of salvation. The Apostle Paul wrote that we have been saved by grace, and it is not our own doing, but we can’t resist making it our doing.

In this knot of complications that we’ve made by what we excuse or add to our faith that Jesus extends his invitation—come, learn, find rest. Give up our burdens and complications and follow him.

In his book The Heart of Pilgrimage, Leland Ryken’s final devotional is an excerpt from Knowing God by J.I. Packer, which ends with this: “God humble us; God instruct us; God make us his own true children.” In commenting on the excerpt, Ryken writes: “The first key to assimilating the passage is to link it to the book’s title. Packer does not do this explicitly, but we ourselves can do it; knowing God means living in an awareness that God is our father, and that we are his children. It is as simple as that.” (pp.171-172)

In kindergarten Bible school, Teacher Kevin plays his guitar as the children sweetly sing Micah 6:8:

He has shown thee O man
What is good and what the Lord requires of thee
But to do justly and to love mercy
And to walk humbly with thy God.

I comment to Kevin that if the only thing the children remember for this year is Micah 6:8, they have everything they need to follow Jesus: do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

It is as simple as that but demands our souls, our lives, our all.