Simple Solutions

Have you heard of "life hacks".  Life hacks are simple, inexpensive solutions to every day problems or inconveniences.  There are websites devoted to these ideas,  (Here Here and Here for example.) So we can use a spoon to keep a pot from boiling over or a cleaned out ketchup bottle to cleanly dispense pancake batter or make an iphone speaker from a paper towel roll or use a sticky note to clean dust out of the computer keyboard.  Sure, a lot of these are solutions to problems that we didn't even know that we had but still when we hear them we say, "Oh, that's clever."   Too bad all of life's problems can't be solved with a hack.

Many of our bigger societal problems can't be solved with a simple hack.  Humans are complicated and society's problems even more so.  Lily Eskelsen Garcia, who is president of the National Education Association, recently related a story where a businessman she was sitting next to on a plane asked her to summarize the one thing that we needed to fix education in this country.  Her response was that we needed less people to believe that the education system could be fixed by doing one thing.

Politicians often try to offer us simplistic solutions to complicated problems.  Then they go to draft the actual law and it's 1000 pages long and full of legalese.  But we can't be too hard on the politicians here.  We collectively have the attention span of a gnat.  When politicians try to give thorough answers to questions, we all tune out before they are half way done.  And then to make matters worse, their political opponents will take part of the explanation out of context and use it against them. 

But fortunately some problems do have solutions that even if they aren't easy, they are simple.  As Christians we are called to be a light in a world full of darkness.  And that is a pretty daunting challenge.  We look at the world and see the problems of poverty and hate and disease and corruption.  We see terrorism at home and abroad.  We see world wide problems of climate change and food shortages and energy allocation.  We see cultural problems such as our desire to meet our spiritual needs through buying the next new thing or the deeper problems of drug addiction and racism. 

We see all of these things and it provides a cloud over society that we as Christians are called to shine through.  But as challenging as the call, the solution is pretty simple.  We shine through it all in the same way that Jesus did.  The same way that the disciples did.  The same way that countless Christians have helped countless people for two thousand years.  One person at a time.  

We may not be able to solve the problems of the world, but we can let others see the love of God through our actions.

Watch this video from Pastor Chris.

We all know someone who needs to see the love of God.  So one day at a time, one person at a time, we let God's love show through us.  So that one by one we help bring light to a dark world.  And while not easy, it is pretty simple.