Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. About a decade ago, my family began preparing for one of the biggest transitions in our lives, moving from The US to Romania in order to help with the ministry there. Unfortunately, we had to move back to The States about a year ago and our hearts have been reeling ever since because none of us want to live here in The States and we all desire to be in Romania. And that is a double edged gut punch right there. Not being where you want to be and being somewhere where you don't want to be.

Derek: 01:04

And that move has also had a serious impact on my ability to spend time podcasting as I now spend thirteen hours a week just commuting to work. You gotta love American infrastructure and commuter culture. Right? Nevertheless, we are thankful for the time that we had in Romania and all of the lessons that God has taught us on that journey. It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, right?

Derek: 01:30

I've already shared a number of insights that we gleaned from our experiences and I'm hoping to be able to share a bunch more this season, as being pulled out of a culture often gives one eyes to see the water that they were swimming in, of which they never really took notice before. And now that I'm entering American culture again, I wanna draw from the lessons I've learned before I acclimate to the water once again. But beyond merely being pulled out of the American culture over the last decade, I feel as though God has been pulling me out of the culture of the world more, or at least he's been trying to pull me out. I'm kind of resistant a lot of times. More and more, I feel like I'm living or at least desiring to live out God's kingdom culture.

Derek: 02:19

I feel like I have new eyes to see the world, even if my heart and my feet lag behind. You can just take a look back through the seasons of this podcast and get a feel for this transformation. Nonviolence, consequentialism, abortion, just war theory, Christian anarchism, abstention from voting, propaganda. I mean, most of what God has been drawing me away from is that with which our culture is enthralled. Violence, war, empire, marketing, results.

Derek: 02:50

I mean, the list just goes on if you go back through the seasons. My cross cultural lens then is not merely on a global scale, rather it's on a multidimensional scale, right, a spiritual scale as well. And it's with these multicultural and multidimensional experiences that I want to present you in this season, what might be the most extreme and difficult case I have presented up to this point in the show. I want to present to you and to myself, the case for simplicity. And I say present this to myself in all seriousness because it's a topic which I find is the hardest to live out, even harder I think than non violence and enemy love.

Derek: 03:34

About ten years ago, my wife and I believed that God was calling us to serve in Romania. And God had been doing a lot to prepare our hearts for service in the years prior to this, namely in giving us hearts to help the poor. There was a lot that moved us towards pursuing full time ministry, but one of the strongest driving forces that pushed us towards moving to Romania was the fact that it was so difficult to do ministry here in The States. My wife and I each had a full time job and we had just had our first child. We were exhausted when we got home from work.

Derek: 04:09

Our child needed our attention and taking care of other obligations around the house ate into most of the rest of our time. I was serving on the church's diaconate and my wife was on the missions committee. There was hardly any time left to do anything, anything with each other and our family, let alone with friends or doing things that we wanted to do. We couldn't be present in the lives of most in our church, let alone those in our community. We were spent, spent but unfulfilled because we wanted to pour ourselves out.

Derek: 04:44

We wanted to pour ourselves into the ministry, but the way that we were being emptied and what we were pouring ourselves out into was just vacuity. It was this vacuum, this nothingness, this vanity. So when the opportunity arose to serve in Romania, we jumped at the chance. In order to get to Romania, however, we had a lot that needed to be accomplished. Namely, we had to pay off our house, school, and car debt.

Derek: 05:15

So while we maintained our full time jobs and ministry positions, we also started to support raise. I have no idea how we added any more to our plate, but we did. And it was exhausting, but we were working for God. Right? One weekend, we were visiting a church, a little small church out in Iowa, and the pastor read a verse from Revelation fourteen eleven that struck me to the heart.

Derek: 05:43

Speaking of hell, the verse reads, quote, and the smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image or for anyone who receives the mark of its name, end quote. That really hit me. I was working hard. I was busy.

Derek: 06:05

I was exhausted. And that felt good, right? I'm doing the Lord's work. I'm doing good. I'm working hard for my family.

Derek: 06:13

I'm making a living. Protestant work ethic, right? And whenever I greeted others at church with platitudes, Hey, how's it going? The response was almost always, Oh, busy as usual, and said with a chuckle. We were all exhausted and all without rest and laughing about it when being without rest is a primary descriptor of hell.

Derek: 06:39

One could turn also to Isaiah to see this hellish concept. Isaiah fifty seven nineteen through 21 says, Peace, peace to those far and near, says the Lord, and I will heal them. But the wicked are like the tossing sea which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked. Or we could turn to Matthew eleven twenty eight through 30 where Jesus says, Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Derek: 07:11

Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light. There is no rest in hell, but in Jesus, there is peace and rest. Yet our road to Romania towards what we perceived as God s will for us at that point was paved with self inflicted sweat and blood and exhaustion. In that year and a half journey of support raising to go to Romania, God had to teach us to rest.

Derek: 07:48

He taught us that our family would be destroyed if we didn't rest. And so we instituted a weekly Sabbath on which we would plan nothing else except family time. He taught us that when we pushed hard for support, we got nothing except familial conflict, exhaustion, and bouts of depression. But when we sat back in faith, God provided. And He taught us that He controls the wind and the waves as He answered a very specific prayer request we made to send a storm that only damaged our roof, a very precise microburst that hung just over our house so that we could get insurance to cover the roof, that our debt might be paid in full.

Derek: 08:28

We experienced some crazy things, but only when we were resting in God and not exhausting ourselves in hell for Him. Now I know that I'm bordering on sacrilege here, seemingly discounting the Protestant work ethic. Even worse, saying that such an ethic, when implemented, often smells more like sulfur. And yeah, I guess I am saying that as the way that I have too often seen such an ethic evoked is in the context of meritocracy, pride, and all the that comes with those things. There's a big difference between working hard for God, in line with Him and His desires, and working for Him.

Derek: 09:12

If you take on the yoke of Jesus, you are connected to Him and where He goes, you go. You work in tandem on the same task and in the same direction with Him easing the load as He walks alongside you. When you work for someone, it's easy to actually work against them by defining the goal or the pace yourself. I mean, I think of the older brother as a prime example of this when you think of the story of the prodigal son, right? The older brother worked for his father and he was always there, always doing what he was supposed to do.

Derek: 09:51

But what you find at the end of the story is that while he had worked for his father, he was actually pitted antithetically, like against him, against his purposes and his will. So for and with are two very different things. Another example, I think of a team of dogs from movies like Balto, where the driver can actually spend a lot of their energy trying to rein in the dogs, pull them back and steer them on course or on an appropriate pace for the distance. If the dogs aren't attuned to the driver, then there are lots of problems and exhaustion. Anyone who has experience with kids will also understand this.

Derek: 10:32

My goal is often for my kids to clean their rooms, but our definitions of clean and our ultimate goals are quite different. They want their room to be a little bit better than it is with the goal of playing outside or playing video games or something like that. If I simply give them the command to clean their room, they get to a point where their rooms appear clean, but only as defined by the absence of visible mess. Just don't open the closet door or look under the bed, right? So often, working for someone at their behest is really a way of disguising working for oneself, accomplishing a goal that is really only done to please oneself and whose results are still a messy room.

Derek: 11:16

In the case of kids, it may be doing a job quickly so they can play something they want or doing a job with the least amount of effort while receiving an allowance. For Christian nationalists, it may be the idea of implementing God's morality, a morality conveniently picked clean of anything that would impose on them, and the implementation of what would bring them prestige or keep their power. And while they may create a nice looking nation, for themselves anyway, They stuff all the dirty laundry in the ghettos and in their shithole countries where they came from. The room is still messy and it's going to have to be cleaned sometime. The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.

Derek: 12:01

The room's gonna get cleaned sometime. And the longer it goes without being cleaned, the more difficult the problem really is. Because if you've stuffed all of the dirty laundry under the bed and into the closet, the next time that room fills up and appears dirty, you've got nowhere left to stuff it. Maybe another place we see this concept of working with rather than working for is when Jesus says that he who is not with Him is against Him. And compare this with Jesus telling those who have prophesied in His name or healed in His name to depart for Jesus never knew them.

Derek: 12:43

They had worked in the name of Jesus for Jesus, but they had not worked with Him. Their wills and their actions were not in line with Jesus' work, so they're judged even though they looked like they did the right thing. For and with are very different. And the for doesn't matter apart from the with. This is going to be a huge concept to understand throughout the season, so rewind it and note it, and we'll come back to this again and again.

Derek: 13:14

Or if you go listen to the consequentialist season with this in mind, that's essentially my whole argument. Right? Doing something for God can be actually doing something against God. For and with are very different things. For defines good and evil for ourselves.

Derek: 13:33

With allows God to define it, both the ends and the means. For is not the same as with. So what does all this have to do with the concept of simplicity? How does bearing an easier yoke as Jesus promised, how does resting rather than working at times, how will that inform our discussion on simplicity? It gets its simplicity and good because simplicity in every sphere is at its root, a relinquishing of one of the currencies of life, of those things which seem to give us power and control in the world.

Derek: 14:11

It's a relinquishing of these things, time, money, social capital, etcetera. Not throwing them away, but relinquishing their power into the hands of God for His use. Or if rather than view it negatively as a relinquishing, we might say that it's a recognition of God rather than counterfeit powers as that which is good, meaningful, and effective in the world. Simplicity is the admission that God is king and we are His servants. It is the recognition that the good is good alone and we should pursue it without any doubleness of mind as Kierkegaard has shown us.

Derek: 14:55

It is God who empowers us for the victory and the good is victorious and always will be even if it doesn't seem like it in the short term. It is God who fights our battles. It is God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills and will provide all my needs. Therefore, I can relinquish. I can hand over my time to do that which is faithful rather than seek to leverage my time for more power, more money, more social standing, or more renown.

Derek: 15:26

I can hand over my money because God's surplus is unlimited and He will provide me with what I need even though that might require me redefining what need means. I can hand over my social capital and maintain my integrity when the rest of the world goes down the evil path because the only standing that matters is my standing with God. But we humans, we love to complicate things that are easy and good. We can't stand simplicity. To avoid the conclusion of simplicity, we usually complicate things, and we do this out of self interest.

Derek: 16:07

We complicate the simplicity of the good, I think, for probably a multitude of reasons, but at least two that come to mind. First, we love to make the good complicated to excuse ourselves from seeing it because that way, we don't become obligated to enact it. It's hard to relinquish that which we think is ours, and it's hard to relinquish that which we think will provide us with power and pleasure. We want to avoid the demands of simplicity. The other way we complicate simplicity of the good is through addition and formalizing in order that through bureaucracy and red tape, through complexity, we can make it appear as though we have done the good.

Derek: 16:51

When we formalize the law and build hedges around it, we then become the creators and interpreters of it to wield how we will. The Pharisees exhibit this method very clearly in the New Testament when Jesus is constantly telling them that you have heard it said, but I say. They had formalized all of the laws so that they could control the wealth and prestige that they were supposed to relinquish, but didn't. Codifying rarely gives power to the reader and more often is that which empowers the codifier. I actually wrote a short little article on this concept, earlier which I'll link in the show notes a little bit.

Derek: 17:32

But I want to pull out something here that I I think maybe elucidates this point a little bit. And I'm not gonna be able to say this guy's name, but this guy like Voltaren Decler Decleri something, he said, in one of his books, he said, Make no laws whatever concerning speech and speech will be free. So soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that freedom does not mean abuse nor liberty, license. And they will define and define freedom out of existence. So, you know, and I talked about this quote in relation to Orwell.

Derek: 18:17

Orwell had a book on the English language and kind of the way that we manipulate things where they essentially talk about the idea that to name something or to define something is actually to have power over it. And so that's one of the things that we love to do with this idea of simplicity. God's good to love. Right? We complicate it and we formalize it and all kinds of things so that we can then define it and say that we're doing the good.

Derek: 18:50

So where does that all leave us then? Is my argument for simplicity, is that really going to reduce to, Hey, just relinquish everything? So when I introduce the term simplicity in relation to economics, you know, you might think immediately that I'm just going to argue that we should all live as homesteaders or Amish. We should just give up everything. Or in relation to technology, we may think of simplicity as implementing rigorous standards against all entertainment and technology.

Derek: 19:20

Once again, like the Amish, maybe like certain certain Amish sects, get rid of all electricity, right? Is that what I'm saying? Am I advocating that there be no video games or televisions in the home or community? Not necessarily, but we do probably need to talk through some pretty difficult and controversial things. And the truth probably looks a whole lot more like those things than it looks like the way that we're living now.

Derek: 19:49

What's important to consider right now though is the tendency to caricature and dismiss simplicity and the good. That can't be what simplicity looks like, we say, as we resign ourselves to solipsism, this resignation that we we just can't really know what the good looks like in regards to simplicity. If we feign ignorance or inaccessibility to knowing, then we can define the good for ourselves. Ironically, we excuse our inability to know the good by referring to its complexity. Yet when we establish our definitions of the good, we rigidly judge those who transgress it because we think that the good can be known.

Derek: 20:31

The good is hard to know when it's being asked of us, but is blatantly obvious when we ask it of others. What is it? Is the good simple or is it complex or is it just convenient? And this is exactly what the Pharisees did, isn't it? They asked simple questions with huge ramifications like, Who is my neighbor?

Derek: 20:54

I can't know that. Acting as though such answers were logically or spiritually complex and difficult to deduce. Yet they set up their own complicated and rigid boundaries in the name of God and called it good, then harshly judged those who didn't tow their line. While we so often work to complicate the good and to go it alone so we can blaze our own trail and define our own good, Jesus shows us the true good and He offers to hoe the row with us. The good, the yoke of Jesus is simple because we are to be yoked with Jesus who does the heavy lifting.

Derek: 21:33

He pulls and He leads and we are to simply walk beside Him. Jesus has shown us what love is, an uncompromising, self emptying, nonviolent, forgiving focus on other, even enemies. That's pretty simple, right? Always choose love no matter what. Sure, that might require a lot of effort on our part, but it ought not to require toil.

Derek: 22:00

Because in my mind at least, toil carries with it the connotations of struggle, often frivolous and empty struggle. But the good is not engaged in a struggle, for Jesus has overcome the world. Victory is assured. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, all good things, all things in line with the kingdom. Jesus won the war and we are now in the proclamation stage, declaring both with our mouths and with our actions that Jesus reigns as king now, not just over the whole cosmos, but even over me.

Derek: 22:39

And his reign is not despotic, but liberating. He simplifies my life and he helps me to live an unencumbered existence that can choose the good always. I don't have to microanalyze every action or figure out ways to justify evil in order to grasp at power and control. Jesus is my victory and my strength, and allowing His reign to demonstrate itself in my life is life giving. Not just to me, but to those who hear and experience my tangible proclamations of the victory of the good, the gospel.

Derek: 23:16

But the problem with proclamations is that they inherently are without force and display. To proclaim that the good is victorious or to do something like love one's enemies and refuse to return evil for evil, they're often perceived as proclamations and actions done out of naivete. Proclamations are important on their own. Their force comes in the truthfulness of the claim which lies in the authority and capability of the source for the proclamation. One must believe both in the power of the source for the proclamation as well as in the credibility of the representative who speaks on their behalf.

Derek: 23:57

It reminds me a little bit of, this, you know, the famous story of this Japanese guy. His name's like Hiro Onoda something. But he kept fighting. He was he was, like, on an island. He was all by himself somehow.

Derek: 24:15

I don't know if everybody else got killed or something, but he's on, like, one of the islands in the South Pacific after World War two has ended. And he's there for, I think, like, decades after World War II has ended. He's just hiding out in the jungle and, like, he kills people randomly who who come up into the jungle. And people are trying to tell him, like, they they leave signs and letters and they try to, like, yell with bullhorns into the into the jungle. They're like, dude, the war is over.

Derek: 24:41

Stop fighting. But he keeps fighting. And the way that they get him to stop is they actually send his, like, former commander or something, somebody who he'll trust, and he is able to get him to step down. The message was true before he believed it, but it took a representative who was reliable for him to actually trust the message. So we need to trust the source and we need to trust the representative, the herald of the proclamation.

Derek: 25:17

Our deviance from the simple goodness of Jesus often indicates to people that we don't really believe the proclamation of the Good News. We are not trustworthy heralds. And that inherently means that we ourselves don't trust God, who is the source. So by our actions, people don't trust us and they don't believe that we believe the source or trust in the source of, you know, this supposed good news that we're proclaiming. Our actions in refusing to do good and in our proclamation of the Gospel, that ends up not being good news to people, or at least not the best news.

Derek: 26:01

Now the Gospel, the good news, the simple message of Jesus so often has rivals, and we are often those rivals. In this season, we are going to talk about some of the rivals to simplicity and the good. And we're gonna make the case for you why you should simply embrace the good. But before we get into the season proper, I wanna spend the rest of this episode situating the season in this podcast as a whole. And second, I want to outline where we're going to go this season and what you can look out for.

Derek: 26:38

So first, how does simplicity fit into a podcast that focuses on nonviolence? I think the book of James may answer this question most clearly and succinctly for us. James four:one-ten will be our theme for this season. And if you get these verses, think you're gonna get everything. James says, What causes fights and quarrels among you?

Derek: 27:03

Do they come from your desire, that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive because you ask the wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

Derek: 27:25

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think scripture says without reason that He jealously longs for the spirit He has caused to dwell in us, but He gives us more grace? That is why scripture says, God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble. Submit yourselves then to God.

Derek: 27:53

Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.

Derek: 28:10

Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will lift you up. Yes, this is a podcast that focuses on issues of nonviolence. But nonviolence isn't simply vowing to avoid doing violence oneself. To combat violence, one has to know from whence violence springs forth, not only out there in the world, but as it springs up within our own hearts. Conflict resolution and conflict prevention are the best methods of nonviolence.

Derek: 28:43

And that prevention begins within our own hearts by embracing the simplicity of Jesus' way and allowing His rule over our own lives. Throughout our seasons, I've made a positive moral case for nonviolence, a negative case against violence and warfare, and I've made a pragmatic case for how to implement nonviolent action. But we have also spent a season looking at consequentialism, a morally bankrupt but popular ethic that causes us to forsake the path of the good. We have also looked at propaganda and lies in order to better understand how we are enticed to believe ill towards others or haughtily towards ourselves or our groups. False beliefs which can cause us to either become complicit in or willfully ignorant to the commission of atrocious violence.

Derek: 29:31

Violence is not an independent act. Rather, it is a deeply rooted act with many branches and much fruit. Simplicity or the lack thereof is possibly the deepest root of them all when it comes to the origin of violence. It reminds me a little bit of when I was, up in Minnesota visiting some family, right? We went to this place far up north and it is the very beginning of the Mississippi River.

Derek: 30:04

And what's crazy is when you go up there, you can actually jump over the Mississippi River, probably even step over. You just step over the Mississippi River. And if you've been down south, like more towards, you know, Louisiana and stuff, and you have seen the full force of the end or the middle of the Mississippi River, it is unfathomable to think about jumping over that river. But you can do it where it starts. It's tiny where it starts, but where it flows to and as it moves down, towards the ocean, it grows.

Derek: 30:42

And that's so much like this idea that James is getting at. What is the root of violence? Right? Violence doesn't just happen. And Jesus says the same thing.

Derek: 30:51

Right? Hatred is akin to murder. Why? Because one's just the source and the murder is just the outflowing of the source that continues to flow. So James, I think, perceptively, accurately identifies fights, wars, or struggles as tending to rise from our desires.

Derek: 31:15

Most of our minds immediately focus on wealth. And if you think back through history, right, land, which equated to wealth, right, wealth and material goods are desires which often lead to violence. We know that violence and poverty are often also very closely linked. When people are poor, their communities tend to be fraught with violence for a variety of reasons, a lot of them centered around their resources and around injustice. But if you have gone through my season on government and propaganda, then you'll know that violence and wealth are, are, very closely linked, not just violence and poverty.

Derek: 31:54

They're actually not very well linked for us by those in power, right? They don't want us to think that poverty causes violence. They want us to think that like poor people are violent, right? That's why they're poor because they make bad moral choices, that whole idea of meritocracy. And so, in the media and in our histories, we aren't really shown the link between poverty and violence too much in that way.

Derek: 32:24

They don't want those things to be linked for us in our minds. They want us to keep the conclusion that riches, lead to justice because good people tend to be rich, right? It's the good people, the frugal people who tend to be able to make it rich. And they want to keep the idea that riches lead to injustice very far from our minds. And that's why the link between violence and wealth are written out of our history and out of the media as much as possible so that we don't make that connection.

Derek: 32:55

But causally, they're very, very related. Empires and the rich are made and fueled by violence and exploitation. The extraction of others' time, the extraction of others' resources, the exploitation of others' bodies. But the extraction of the rich on the world is really a devious one. It used to be that when a dentist extracted a tooth from your mouth, a small tooth, tiny tooth, one little tiny part of your body, your whole mouth would hurt and the pain could be unbearable.

Derek: 33:28

It could control you. If you've ever been in need of a root canal, you know how debilitating a toothache can be. Despite the localized pain of a tiny part of your body or of a tiny wound created by the dentist, your whole body and mind could suffer. It would be all you could feel and all you could think about. But that was all before anesthesia, of course.

Derek: 33:51

To save your body and mind the trouble of being weighed down and controlled by such a small part of your body, the dentist can give you anesthesia. While your tooth socket screams out in pain as it's being extracted, the rest of your body slumbers, your neurons and synapses oblivious to the tragedy experienced by your gums. The tooth screams out but its messages are not carried to or heard by the rest of your body. And this is precisely what the dentists, the extractors of wealth do in the world. They extract and exploit one part of the body while providing anesthesia to the rest of the body.

Derek: 34:28

And sometimes they produce slumber by choosing victims who are far removed from those with power and preventing the media from focusing on their injustice, so their message is never heard. And sometimes they anesthetize the masses through bread and circuses so that those who could hear or do hear choose not to hear. They're too distracted. It'd be too inconvenient to hear the cries and risk losing the bread and circuses that were satiating and distracting. As Joseph Pierre Prudhon points out, when governments sense that the people are restless, they try to appease them with comforts and pleasures.

Derek: 35:07

And when that doesn't work, they distract them through war, giving them an enemy to fight and resources to extract from elsewhere. Notice that the suffering, the suffering that comes from exploitation, extraction, injustice or war is as much as possible exported. It happens on other soil, in other lands, to other people. The wealthy are great at making and exporting the violence and bloodshed which produce their wealth. They're great at pitting one group against another and creating others who are unworthy.

Derek: 35:44

If you want a great modern fictional depiction of this concept, just go read or watch The Hunger Games. And when you do, think about how the capital became so wealthy. Only a few in the capital are really living it up and many are actually struggling. You can see this in the newest prequel, Songbirds and Snakes. But most of the capital citizens are oblivious to what is going on outside of the capital and are often too busy being caught up in the allure of the wealth flowing in around them, hopeful that maybe they too can grab a piece of that wealth even though it is gained by dehumanizing others.

Derek: 36:19

The Hunger Games is the story of empire. It's the story of us. The rich and the comfortable protect each other and refuse to do violence amongst themselves and rather exploit, domineer, enslave, pollute, violate, and kill those in defenseless communities, in impoverished communities. But eventually, as the wealth gets hoarded and funneled to even the few within the empire, poverty comes home to roost and so does violence. But whether it the poor or the rich who do violence, this violence that is birthed comes from desires.

Derek: 36:55

The poor desiring that which they need or to close the inequity gap between them and the rich, and the rich doing violence out of a desire to acquire more while protecting that which they've already successfully hoarded. Now I know we just spent a lot of time focusing on the aspect of wealth here. And honestly, that probably is where we're going to spend a lot of our time this season. But there are definitely other aspects of simplicity that we want to address too. And to close out this introduction, I hope you get the point that simplicity is vital to understanding everything else that we've discussed throughout this podcast.

Derek: 37:32

It's the root for the good and the desire which tempts us away from the good, how it ultimately lead to violence and the justification of it. So where do fights and quarrels, where do wars come from? They come from our desires, our desire for power, for comfort, and for security. And that desire for control produces simplicity's antithesis, complexity and busyness and distraction. We will explore these concepts, simplicity and complexity more fully in our following episodes.

Derek: 38:08

That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.