Simple

@andrewburchfield.com

Simple

I've been pondering that word, its meaning and its ramifications, quite a bit of late. It's not as if the world in which I live is highly complex and fraught with significant difficulty. It really isn't but there are times when I like to think that it is. I don't think I'm alone in that notion. I think we can all pinpoint times in our lives when we have made things more challenging for ourselves than they need to be. For example:

Losing sleep over whether or not my upgrade on my London flight will clear.
Getting increasingly bothered about this being my 50th year of life.
Letting excuses (laziness, people, laziness) prevent me from doing right by my middle-aged body.
Being highly irritated by the fact that Matt LeBlanc will be one of the new hosts of "Top Gear"
The specter of a Trump presidency literally has my stomach in convulsive knots #NeverTrump

My list is not exhaustive and may be a little trivial (except for that horrifying Trump bit) but it typifies what I think we do to ourselves far too often. We've forgotten to keep things simple.

The great American philosopher Ronald Ulysses Swanson weighed in on this in his own inimitable way when he said:

"Live your life how you want,

but don't confuse drama with happiness."

Amen, Ron, amen.

Not the Three Tenors

Three missionaries and a family of three

With this week's letter from TMFKATB, he filled us in on what it's like to be training two missionaries at the same time. It is something of an unusual situation, as typically Mormon missionaries work in pairs (because you've seen two of them at your door or two of them on their bikes), or companionships as they are known in the vernacular of the Church. That is, as I said, the typical situation and, of course, TMFKATB finds himself on the outside of typical.

Six weeks ago, he started training a brand-new missionary. Normally that training lasts for two transfers, as these six weeks period are known. Last week, TMFKATB learned he'd be training again - another brand-new missionary - but that young man would join as a third. So the duo becomes a trio. The Three Tenors they are not. But just as Jose, Placido, and Luciano had to learn their voices, these three are learning to do the same. They are learning to blend their voices (in another language) and their styles of teaching as well as their desires to serve their fellowman. As he put it, "It's going to be interesting." I'm confident he'll make it work.

As I've noted before, it's been quite an experience as a father to be taught by my son as he serves this two-year mission. He and I were going back and forth about a challenge (albeit a minor one) that has been vexing me and out of nowhere, he popped off with the following:

Maybe God just wants to work even harder than you are to do this. You can do much harder things. You got this. Think positive.

He didn't cure cancer with that statement, nor did he explain why the awful Kardashians are a thing (only Satan himself can do that). What he did was state simply what I needed to hear. Am I ever glad for the simple things!