Some of the most famous and easily recognizable words from any poet are:

          "The woods are lonely, dark and deep,

          but I have promises to keep

          and miles to go before I sleep."

I'm sure you recognize those words from your high school English class as the words of the American poet Robert Frost.  They are quite striking and for most folks they come easily to mind.   I was thinking about those words the other day when someone asked me what a particular verse of Scripture meant. The verse they showed me was quite a simple verse, yet they thought there might be some profound and probably darkly hidden meaning in that verse. I didn't see anything hidden at all and that's why I began thinking about Robert Frost's poetic verse.

A few years ago at a conference on poetry, a group of literary critics were discussing the works of Robert Frost.  They had been focusing on the verse I quoted above and they spent hours discussing the implications of the deep metaphysical symbolism of those lines.  The next day, Robert Frost gave a lecture to the conference participants. After the speech, those literary critics asked Mr. Frost what he had in mind when he wrote those famous lines. Frost thought about it for a few moments and then said, "Shucks, it's pretty simple, all I meant was I was tired and I wanted to get on home and go to bed."

 As I thought about it, I began to realize how easy it is for us to over-complicate life. Sometimes we look for complicated solutions to really simple situations. Sometimes we don't communicate well with one another because we tend to "see" a problem where none really exists.  It think it was St. Francis of Assisi who said that the closer we get to God, the simpler things are.  Our tendency is to complicate things. God's way is simple. I don't think god intended our lives to be so complicated, frenetic or quite so confusing. I believe he intended things to be peaceful. Or to put it another way, as Robert Frost put it, "Shucks, it's pretty simple..."