In honor of the recently passed Valentine's Day, here is a "K.I.S.S."
(I'm guessing that many of you know that "K.I.S.S." stands for "Keep It Simple Stupid".)
Today we, as a people, are pretty suspicious of complexity. In cases like a tax attorney who can take a person earning a zillion dollars and make them pay no taxes, we look at complexity as a morally suspicious indicator. Not necessarily "wrong", but something to keep an eye on. The old “I’m not sure how they did that but something just doesn’t look right…”
But today I listen to spiritual, economic and political questions being reduced to competing slogans: "Conservative" vs "Liberal", "Pro Life" vs "Pro Choice", Global Warming “Scarifiers” vs Global Warming “Deniers”... it goes on and on. And these are all issues where important, and often relatively complex, issues are reduced to a simple slogan pertaining to a simple principal which one side or the other believes is the core issue at play.
This is because real issues and real life aren’t simple and they aren’t always easily understood. We use slogans because they clean things up, make them neat (and sometimes they justify the conclusion we’ve already reached on a subject). The problem is that a simple slogan doesn’t really make the complexity go away. Slogans only hide the complexity. As we become adults we eventually acknowledge that “The Devil is in the details.” The very details the slogans help us ignore.
On the other hand, simple principles are often the key to sorting out and resolving complex issues. The problem is “finding the right principal for the problem” and, of course, maintaining the humility to understand that you may be wrong. I think I struggle with these issues on an almost daily basis and heaven knows I don’t have all the answers. But I have come to believe that "K.I.S.S." is important, but it also needs to be modified a little:
“Keep It Simple Stupid...
But Never Make It More Simple than It Really Is."
But Never Make It More Simple than It Really Is."
That’s right… “K.I.S.S.B.N.M.I.M.S.T.I.R.I.” (Yeah, right. I can see right now, that’s really gonna take off and sweep the globe!)
[…chuckle…]
I’m thinking maybe we should just seek God’s face, listen to Him and follow His direction, instead of all this other stuff. Is that too simple? Probably. I'm a simple guy...
“For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.”- Proverbs 1:32-33
