God Doesn’t Want Us Comfortable
Comfort is a great thing. No one wants to sit on an uncomfortable couch, we all want our home to be a comfortable place, and no one wants to wear an itchy sweater. Everyone wants to be comfortable. Comfort means being relaxed, being more yourself, and feeling secure. Comfort is perfectly fine and great in the physical aspects of life, clothes, furniture, and homes, but maybe that’s it. Maybe comfort isn’t supposed to go beyond physical things. Maybe it isn’t meant for how we live our life.
Since I’ve been married I’ve always felt like God was pulling my husband and I away from wherever we were comfortable. We moved 1600 miles away from all friends and family, and the place we were both comfortable and had always called home. We lived in a small apartment that just never really felt like home. My husband was in graduate school working as a grad assistant making very little so we had the smallest, and tightest budget ever–which wasn’t always comfortable to work with.
Then we finally started to get into a rhythm of that life and make what we felt was a great plan for the future, God made us uncomfortable again. My husband didn’t get into the PhD program like we had always planned he would. That meant we had about 6 months to find him a job before the university stopped paying him, and that was very scary and uncomfortable. Then he found a job, a great job and loved it, and after his second week there we found out I was pregnant.
The last 12 months of our lives have pushed us out of our comfort zones of being in control and feeling like we get any say in our future plans. Every day and each month all we could do was make a small plan for the weekly future, and honestly God has blessed us more in this season than I could have ever dreamed of.
This has made me realize that sometimes God calls us to be uncomfortable. Great things don’t happen when you are cozy in your comfort zone. Esther from the Bible is a great example of this (her story is recorded in the Book of Esther in the Old Testament). She was an orphan living with her uncle in a foreign city which I’m sure wasn’t the most comfortable place to be. Then suddenly she’s chosen by the King to be his new Queen just as one of the kings nobles wanted to destroys the Jews, Esther’s people. Esther’s uncle persuades her to use her new position close to the king to try and save her people; again, I can’t imagine how uncomfortable that was. She’s super young, newly married to a king and now she needs to try and persuade him against one of his highest nobles. She did it though, and ultimately the Jews were saved because Esther went where God needed her. She went where she was uncomfortable, and that is where God can do the best things.