Home & Blog | Lynne Baab

Simplicity and prayer

Lynne Baab • Tuesday May 23 2023

God of beauty and peace, help me to uncomplicate and untangle my life so I can focus on what really matters.

In that prayer for simplicity, I am using Adele Ahlberg Calhoun’s words from her wonderful Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. She writes that our desire in embracing the spiritual practice of simplicity is “to uncomplicate and untangle my life so I can focus on what really matters.” [1] I love that the words “uncomplicate and untangle” can refer to many things: our physical possessions that can feel overwhelmingly cluttered, our schedule that can feel endlessly complicated, and our relationships that can feel hopelessly...

Read full article »

Worshipping God the Creator: voluntary simplicity in action

Lynne Baab • Wednesday July 20 2016

Some years ago we offered at class at our church on the book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, by Ronald Sider. In the 1997 revision of the book, Sider makes many connections between world poverty and environmental degradation, because it is usually the poor who suffer the most ill effects from the impact of pollution. About six months after the class, one woman who had attended told me about the great impact the class had on her.

Before reading the book, she had no idea of the extent of world poverty or its connection to pollution. After the class, she...

Read full article »

Worshipping God the Creator: voluntary simplicity

Lynne Baab • Thursday July 14 2016

As we slow down to experience the joy of this moment in this particular place in God’s creation, we understand more deeply God’s call to be careful stewards of all that God made. Part of that stewardship needs to be a reevaluation of the way we live in our consumer society.

Day and night the beauty of nature speaks to us of God’s greatness and calls us to praise and prayer. Day and night our consumer culture is also speaking to us, but the message is very different.

“More is better.” “If you are feeling sad, discouraged, or sexually unattractive, you will feel...

Read full article »