Finding Comfort Uncomfortable

There is a quote that I read. It says, “Between what is said and done... there’s a lot more said than done.” Man, that gets me. I do say I lot of things and I do want a lot of people to understand what I say, catch the vision and do it. Make the changes, live a righteous life, love your neighbor, give back to the world... And I continue to write these things, say these things and my own heart too many times doesn’t quite make it there. I’m concerned with my own life, my own success, that I fail to see the needs of those around me. I often want to fit in, so I often try to be the funny one, the likable, barely-scratch-the-surface kind of guy. When in reality, most people do crave the person who is genuinely interested in delving deeper. What keeps us from going there. Is it too much work? Too risky? Too... uncomfortable?

I often will go through a period of my life where “everything is good” and I become... comfortable. Usually after being comfortable for some time, I wake up and realize it. I become uncomfortable with being comfortable. I get scared and realize I’m not living genuinely and intentionally with those around me. I say “I get scared” because that is exactly the kind of person I don’t want to be. I’ve always told myself that I didn’t want to live a “normal” life. I definitely didn’t want to “conform to the patterns of this world.” And when Kylee and I met, that is an interest we both shared with each other (one of the many things that attracted me to her). We didn’t want to be “normal.”

You know, I think that is a desire that God instills in those who yearn after him. That’s what the ministry of Jesus was all about. Jesus broke the “social norms” and made a lot of people angry because of it. I think they got angry because they felt convicted. Often when we feel convicted, we are so stubborn and prideful that our default reaction is defensiveness. When someone challenges our beliefs or what we see as “socially acceptable” by living a life different from the way we live it, it becomes personal and we hate that feeling. “Who do they think they are?” “Do they even realize the image they are portraying?” “What are they trying to prove?” “Do they have any regard for those around them?” Do you find yourself dealing with these questions? So did the Pharisees. So did those who put Jesus to death. So did those who cared so much about their own way of life that they were too blind to see another way of life, another world, an alternative lifestyle to the norm. They became blind to the Savior of the world, because what they had going for them worked for them. They weren’t about to change. They weren’t about to sell everything they had to follow his lifestyle. And instead of realizing their short-comings and accepting their need for this Jesus to help them, they walked away from him trying to rationalize, “Well, if I can’t make myself sell everything that I have, then there must be something else I can make myself do that’s close to if not equal to that.”

The thing is, we will never fully be not of the world. Because we sin, we slip up, we find ourselves getting comfortable with what we have and forgetting about the uncomfortable state of the majority of the world stricken with poverty, famine, slavery, lack of clean water, abuse, neglect... But what we must come to realize on a daily basis is that we are in need of a savior, to become uncomfortable with our comfort, to learn from our feelings of conviction, to live in humility enough to remain open to an alternative way of life... This is a daily realization, a daily death to our own ideas of success and the common misconception of the need to achieve comfort. Perhaps in actuality there is more fulfillment in being reliant on a daily basis and knowing not what tomorrow will bring and understanding that today is a gift that you did nothing to receive.

See, the world tells us to be successful for comfort’s sake. But comfort leads to complacency and complacency leads to seclusion and seclusion is not living how we are designed to live. We are designed to live in community. And we are designed to live in community because we are designed to love. We are designed to love so that others, who have never experienced love, can experience love. And we need to experience love because the soul yearns for the very thing that brought all of creation into being in the first place: the love of a divine creator... and this love is not of this world... and this love is not comfortable.