Alex VanDuyne
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

I’ve been reading a book on my PRDs, The Freedom of Simplicity by Richard Foster. He spends the first chunk of the book talking about simplicity as an attitude and orientation of the heart rather than an outward discipline. Of course all disciplines are both, that’s the sacramental reality of creation, but simplicity is especially prone to becoming an outward-only practice.

The truth is we can quite easily get rid of half our positions without getting rid of any of our idols. We can very realistically endeavor to speak less and listen more, and yet exchange our deception-through-abundance-of-words with deception-through-silence. Like everything it is complicated and murky. Like most things it is less a skill than an ongoing conversation with God as we excavate our hearts together.

In the book Foster talks about the idea of having the ‘single eye’. This is not to become a cyclops, but to desire exactly one thing with every part of your self. This is a Jewish concept, the same concept that gave rise to the ‘evil eye’. The evil eye represents one who is totally devoted to coveting other people’s good things. The single eye is totally devoted to cultivating other people’s good things.

But we’re not generally single-eyed for good or evil. We have within ourselves a shocking number of competing voices and desires. Any Christian in a relationship understands both the good desire for holy purity and good desire for sexual intimacy. Anyone with money understands a desire to save and invest in an abundant future and a desire to have good things right now. Anyone with control over their time recognizes the desire to rest and invest in family, the desire to work and get ahead, and the desire to train and develop excellence for the tasks of your next promotion. The pull of desires is not binary, but a three dimensional thing with our desires pulling us in a hundred different directions simultaneously. Between all of these we have some kind of net force movement in one particular direction, a sum of all our hopes and hungers.

I think of this as the shattered self. It is the picture I see — of a person, myself, pulled in a hundred different directions, reflecting a hundred different images and angles simultaneously.

Learning to walk like Jesus is about stewarding our affections. It is about learning to love the good things of God and turn toward them. About learning to disregard the lesser things and turning from them. It’s about turning our entire selves in a certain direction, like a satellite dish reflecting all incoming signals to a single point, like an intact mirror reflecting a single perfect image of our creator.

Alex VanDuyne

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Worshipper. Thinker. Friend.