It was a tranquil scene: small waves rippled along the shoreline, fishing boats drifted across the sea, birds glided in the wind. That morning I’d left the chaos of the school run, the market, and the people rushing to work, and walked over to a quiet beach in my town with no other agenda but to walk, think, and pray.
As I looked at the open blue sky, the waning moon, and the contrails of the airplanes, my senses settled and I thanked God. Behind me was the town—messy, dirty, and busy—and before me was the sparkling blue Tyrrhenian Sea. All I’d had to do to find rest that morning was shift my focus away from the dirt and the mess and focus on God and His gifts of quiet, beauty, and peace.
In a world brimming with stimulation, stress, and speed, our hearts have a deep yearning for simple moments enjoying God’s blessings. Although the world attempts to convince us that joy can be found in more stuff, more activities, and more hustle, we all know deep down that it’s the simple things of life—dinner with friends, walks in nature, unhurried time over breakfast with family, a cup of coffee and a long book—that brings us the greatest joy.
Ironically, sometimes we complicate simplicity. We think we can only live a simple life if we move to a farm and grow our own vegetables or if we live in a log cabin in the woods.
So let’s look together at a general principle that will help us simplify our lives so that we can slow down and enjoy the blessings God gives us.
A General Principle to Simplify Your Life: Subtract
Simplifying is about subtraction rather than addition.
In a world that revolves around more, more, more, subtracting things feels uncomfortable for most of us. When we think of removing things from our lives, we think of lack, restriction, limitation. What we rarely realize is that it’s having too much that imprisons us. More stuff requires more of our attention, more activities demand more of our energy, and more commitments add to our mental load.
Why We Choose to Complicate Our Lives
Often we complicate our lives because we want to hack our way to the perfect house, the perfect body, the perfect life. And so we create intricate meal plans that not only require heavy planning but also extensive grocery shopping, heavy homemaking systems, and a long list of hobbies and self-care pursuits to give us fulfilment.
I’m all for meal planning, efficient homemaking, and engaging hobbies. My only caveat is that they must actually add value to our lives without becoming an idol—a central focus our entire world revolves around. What frequently happens is that the quest for perfection drives us to add more and more things to our schedules and our homes, compelling us to work overtime to afford them. This constant addition of activity hijacks our focus, transforming our lives into a relentless hamster wheel where hurry and stress are the fuel.
The quest for perfection drives us to add more and more things to our schedules and our homes, compelling us to work overtime to afford them.
Recently I asked my mom to tell me about her childhood, and although life in Britain in the 1950s was hard in many ways, I also noticed how wonderfully simple it was.
Meals were based on wholesome food, which my grandma planned on rotation (a roast on Sundays, meat and chips on Mondays, stew on Tuesdays). Presents were reserved for Christmas and birthdays, and children spent their free time playing hide and seek, climbing trees, and riding their bikes.
What if the best gift we could give ourselves and our families is actually freedom? Unhurried time to cook dinner? The kids playing quietly for an hour after basketball practice instead of rushing to the next activity on the list? A long Saturday lunch with friends and family instead of a day rushing from one commitment to the next?
So now let’s look at five specific guidelines that will help us live like this.
5 Guidelines to Simplify Your Life
1. Reduce Household Inventory
Decluttering is one of the best ways to simplify our lives. The less inventory we have, the less inventory we have to manage. By decluttering our homes, we eliminate the silent to-do list—the implicit messages we get from our possessions regarding their care, maintenance, or organization. For example, a pile of bills sitting on the dining room table will constantly remind us we need to set aside time to pay them.
By not only reducing the amount of stuff we have but also organizing it appropriately, we also create a calmer atmosphere in our homes.
At the beginning of the year, I was forced to reduce the amount of inventory we had as a family of five to only what we could fit in our seven-seater car, as we were moving overseas in the summer.
The whole process of decluttering our home inventory made me realize how much we’d held on to unnecessarily for years: Tupperware without lids, kitchen items no one used, clothes, books and toys the children had outgrown, outdated paperwork.
So now in our new house here in Italy, I’ve attempted to be as minimalist as possible, not only because it’s small but also because I’ve learnt from experience that fewer possessions equals more time and less mental load.
2. Cut Costs
Sometimes our lives are complicated because we have numerous financial obligations: car payments, hobbies, children’s extracurriculars, beauty treatments, entertainment subscriptions, and the list goes on.
Life becomes so much simpler when we reduce costs. Here are a few ways we can do this:
- Go from three to two cars, or even two to one! (Crazy as it may seem, we’ve only ever had one family car, but we live in Europe and walk most places.)
- Cut back to just one TV streaming service (or even none!).
- Reduce monthly subscriptions. Ask yourself: Do I really use all these?
- Prioritize specific hobbies (for you) and extracurriculars (for your children) in specific seasons and ditch the others. Doing a myriad of activities all at once is not only expensive, it’s also time-consuming and stressful.
- Reduce your food costs by creating a very simple rotational meal plan, and reserve eating out or takeaway for specific occasions.
3. Eliminate Digital Distractions
In the past, we would go to the office, work, and then leave our work there when we clocked out. Nowadays, our work goes with us everywhere, courtesy of our devices.
While we often can’t choose to relinquish social media or email because of our jobs and other commitments, we can lessen the impact they have on us when we are trying to live simple, restful and purposeful lives.
One way we can reduce digital distraction and information overload is by eliminating social media and email apps from our personal phones and using these only on our computers, and/or on our work phones. (And turn them off at the end of the day!)
With regard to fun-but-time-wasting digital narcotics like games, communication, lifestyle and shopping apps, we can lessen their influence simply by setting our phones to focus mode and disabling the apps at certain times of the day.
4. Choose Focus Over “Productivity”
As women, we often try to get as many things done as possible each day, and so we create enormous to-do lists. However, because our checklists aren’t realistic, we end up trying to do too much, too fast.
When we observe Jesus’s life here on earth, we can see that while He had a full life, He didn’t hurry or strive to get as many things done as possible each day. Instead, Jesus focused on doing only that which was His Father’s will. This meant Jesus said no to anything that didn’t fit into that, or that simply wasn’t timely. By doing so, Jesus built margin for the things He was called to do.
As followers of Jesus, we are to do the same. By prayerfully surrendering our to-do lists to the Lord and only doing what He wants us to do, when He wants us to do it, we’ll be able to live purposefully and proactively instead of getting distracted with everything.
I find it helpful to brain dump all the things I need to do (work tasks, grocery shopping, running errands) with all the things I want to do (meeting a friend for coffee, starting a creative project) onto a piece of paper, and then pray and organize these tasks into different categories: “Go Ahead” (all the items I can and/or should schedule), “Wait” (the activities the Lord has shown me that are good but not timely), and “Eliminate” (the ones to cross out completely.)
Then, in the “Go Ahead” category, I also find it helpful to assign tasks to specific days so that each day only has three or four priority to-dos.
5. Establish a Weekly Day of Rest
Here’s a hard but necessary truth: It’s impossible to both simplify our lives and keep competing in the rat race.
If we desire to enjoy the simple blessings of community, time alone with God, food, nature, life-giving pursuits, we need to make time for rest.
Indeed, choosing to simplify is about no longer trying to be the superhero “do it all” woman, and allowing God to be God—the only One who can do all things.
From the beginning of time, God created a rest rhythm, which He bound up into the very fabric of creation. No human being was ever meant to work 24/7, 365 days a year.
If you often feel tempted to work for your worth, please remember God loves you when you rest just as much as when you work. You don’t have to prove yourself; He already loves you!
Taking a weekly rest is essential for you to learn to slow down, embrace God’s loving boundaries, and learn that you can’t control the world. Learning to relinquish control isn’t easy, yet I promise you that when you do, you’ll find that embracing God’s rest will bless your life in ways you can’t even imagine.
Simplification Starts With Saying “No”
But what if there are legitimate things we need? Projects the Lord puts on our hearts to carry out? New commitments He wants us to assume?
Saying no to more stuff is not about relinquishing our legitimate needs. It’s about refusing to cling to things that don’t add value to our lives.
Saying no to more activities is not about dismissing what the Lord is calling us to do. If He’s calling us to something, we must do it! However, we need to make sure we pray before we take on new activities, and that we prayerfully filter what we’re currently doing under the same lens of God’s will.
Saying no to more commitments is not about becoming lazy. It’s about only taking on new commitments we know are God’s will, and asking Him to reveal which ones we’re involved in now that we need to change, eliminate, or simplify.
Where to Start
I provided five guidelines to help you simplify your life, and while all are important, and I follow them all, I want to encourage you not to adopt every single one all at once. Studies show that our brains cannot handle too many habit changes at once. Instead, choose one guideline to start with and, when you’ve implemented it for three weeks, add another one. From there, stack another habit after three weeks, and so forth, until you’ve achieved all five.
My personal recommendation is that you start with the one guideline that you notice is the most pressing in your life. This could be decluttering your home (to reduce the visual stimulation and silent-to-list), implementing a day of rest, or even simply reducing digital distraction.
If you’re unclear on where to start, ask a trusted friend to help you discern. Don’t attempt it on your own. Pray and ask the Holy Spirit to help you (and your family if the case may be) and get accountable to a loved one.
Concluding Prayer
Lord, help me to simplify my life and clearly guide me in how to do it well. I pray that I will stop striving to earn my own worth and instead, rest completely in my identity in You. Help me to release the need for control and trust fully in Your provision. Amen!
