Slower, Simpler
LETTER BY BRIAN MORYKON
Can you imagine the freedom we’ll feel when everything we own can fit in a camper?
My wife and I imagined it, then experienced it when we pulled out onto the open road with our three kids and most of our earthly positions quite literally in our rear view mirror.
We dubbed our journey The Road Home because we wanted to find not only simplicity and adventure but also our place and our people.
After several months and many wonderful sights, someone at an RV park asked our eight-year-old daughter her favorite part of the trip. She lit up and ran into the camper, closed the door and slid open its chintzy center panel. She peaked through the opening and exclaimed, I love this little window!
Three thousand miles and a dozen state parks and our kid finds the most joy in an eight dollar piece of plastic.
That trip almost broke us in every sense of the word. We never found the perfect city or ideal Christian community because of course they don’t exist. We did find God at the usual address, at the end of our rope. God provided an imperfect city and messy Christian community. We learned the good and simple life we sought wouldn’t be found through some radical renunciation but through a continual yielding of our normal days to the purifying presence of Christ.
It’s many years later now and the world keeps accelerating. We all feel it. Infinite information. Instant everything. And it’s true, to not be swept away we need anchors of intentional action: get outside, delay gratification, stop buying what we can and can’t afford. Who knows, maybe get crazy and chuck Alexa in the Goodwill bin. But if our actions are to lead to freedom and not a different kind of slavery, they must be sustained by love and not driven by any compulsion or fear or ideal no matter how virtuous the ends may seem. Christ is our life. We are God’s beloved and chosen people. Our starting place, our end goal, our pathway to true simplicity — to being content with a little or a lot — is Christ who gives us strength (Col 3; Phil 4).
Brian Morykon
Director of Communications
P.S. We’re excited at Renovaré about Grace Pouch’s new book, Savoring Childhood, available now. It has practical (and realistically do-able) ideas for parents and grandparents to foster a non-anxious and spiritually rich childhood.
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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1.
I joined Nate on this week’s episode of the Life With God podcast to talk about my new book Savoring Childhood and how small steps toward a slower, simpler lifestyle create space for a deeply rooted life of love for God and others.
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2.
What makes someone well-off by God’s standards? In “Simple Tastes: Learning the Secret of Being Content,” I write about how to gently mold children’s appetites for things that truly matter—and how to let Jesus revive our own delight in simplicity amidst a culture of fast consuming.
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3.
“Simplicity asks us to let go of the tangle of wants so we can receive the simple gifts of life that cannot be taken away.“ Read “Simplicity: A Practical Guide” by Adele Calhoun.
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4.
Through example after example on the pages of Scripture, God molds our vision of a good life and shows us how to step into it. Don’t miss the opportunity listed below in Events—our upcoming free webinar: Shaped by the Word.
Grace Pouch
Content Manager
WORTH QUOTING
Simplicity is the only thing that sufficiently reorients our lives so that possessions can be genuinely enjoyed without destroying us. Without simplicity we will either capitulate to the ‘mammon’ spirit of this present evil age, or we will fall into an unChristlike legalistic asceticism.
– Richard Foster
Celebration of Discipline
(source)
RENOVARÉ EVENTS
Webinar: Shaped by the Word: How does our engagement with Scripture form us?
Online - Thursday May 21, 2026
Some worry that spiritual formation downplays Scripture, yet Renovaré affirms its centrality. Join Tim Mackie (BibleProject) and Carla Harding (24−7 Prayer) with host Carolyn Arends as they explore Scripture as both a sure guide and a place of encounter with God. Together, we’ll discuss spiritual formation, common misunderstandings, and practical ways to read the Bible for transformation.
A Listening Group offers honest sharing and deep listening to God and one another through an intentional 90-minute structure that forgoes fixing and advice-giving. Experience a Listening Group online for free. Learn more and view times.
TO CONTEMPLATE
Mother and Child
Elizabeth Catlett 1956 · photo by Victoria Emily Jones
(source)
I used to think that the psalmist’s words “Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother” had to do with sitting motionless and not speaking. Physical stillness and silence are helpful practices for guiding our focus to God, but this psalm is about cultivating inward stillness. It’s about freedom to delight in God’s presence when we are not distracted by disordered desires and hungrily crying for more. A nursing infant is weaned little by little, and our progress toward contentment grows in baby steps, too, as we slow down our frantic schedules and fast consuming habits and learn to delight in simple pleasures, like togetherness and touch. When the “nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness” dies down, we can be present to God like a weaned baby is happy in his mother’s arms.
TO PONDER
O Lord, you who are the Bread of Life, help us, we pray, to be content with the bread that you give us this day, neither grasping for more, for fear of being in want tomorrow, nor shrinking away, for fear that we do not deserve it, so that we might feel sated with your good provision. We pray this in the name of God our Provider. Amen.
— David O. Taylor from Prayers for the Pilgrimage