To have a simple heart

Many times in life, I make things more complicated than they are. I have this wonderful ability to analyze and think deeply, a natural capacity cultivated by being an English major at a liberal arts college. I am grateful for this ability to think critically and deeply, and treasure it as one of my greatest gifts, because it nurtures my ability to understand myself and express my understanding -- or lack thereof -- in words.

Sometimes, though, and especially when it comes to thinking about the future, I turn myself in circles with over-thinking and over-analyzing. At times like this, I get so single-minded that I trick myself into believing life and God are things I have to "figure out."

While talking with my friend Priya the other day, she told me that her prayer for the summer has been to have a simple heart. When she said this, it felt like breathing fresh air. Simple. Of course -- how could I forget?

God is not trying to hide from me or make things overly complicated. He doesn't try to trick me, or dangle things in front of me just to snatch them away. He is honest and straightforward in his love for me, offering his love whether or not I choose to offer it back.

He is also a God of the present, living and alive in each moment as we reside in it, and this is where we know him. Not in a future that isn't yet real, that causes us to worry about a myriad of things. He was there in the past and will be there in the future, but he chooses to call himself I AM, in the present. Life is about walking through the doors he opens and trusting him and his love that has always been there for us, letting him teach us along the way.

To have a simple heart -- to take God at his word and bring him with me wherever I go, trusting the doors I'm walking through are the ones he has opened, or that he will get me to the ones he's opened if they're not. This is my prayer.

I want to learn to take God at his word -- to trust him with each day, to live fully in each moment, trusting that he is there and that he will show me what is next when it's time. I want to allow him to reveal each moment to me, to give him all that I want and all that I am, like his little child. I want to live in his freedom that comes from simplicity. I want to trust him.

When I make life and God too complicated, maybe I miss the point, miss the joy of it all. I don't want to miss the joy or the life that comes from trusting and free-falling into God -- it's what he's given us to know him.

Mia Pohlman is a Perryville, Missouri, native and a recent graduate of Truman State University with a bachelor's degree in English.