Caution: Comfort Zone Ahead
For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm. –Proverbs 1:32,33
Winter weather is some of the best sleeping weather for me. My room is cold and I’m warm under my blankets. I find it hard to get up in the morning and face that chilly air when it would be so much more comfortable to sleep in! Spiritually, this can happen to us as well. We all have comfort zones that we would prefer not to leave. In fact, the easy thing to do would be to stay put where it’s familiar. I saw an old quote recently (and by “old” I mean from 1992—which shouldn’t qualify as old, but probably does at this point) that commented on how complacency affects us. Essentially the author observed that complacency causes people to fear—fear the unknown, fear the new, fear the unfamiliar. Isn’t this true? Sometimes the place we seek for comfort and security ends up becoming a box that holds us back and keeps us from growing. That box is constructed of fear and the enemy counts on us staying in it so we don’t fulfill all of our destiny in God. Jimmy Carter once said, “I hate to see complacency prevail in our lives when it’s so directly contrary to the teaching of Christ.” God assures us in Isaiah 43:19 that He is doing a new thing! Lamentations 3:22, 23 says His compassions are new every day. Yes, God is the same yesterday, today and forever, but He is also about doing something new every day. Every day He is working another step in His plan, calling us to a deeper level in Him, bringing us to a place of more complete healing, and revealing more and more of His grace and love. His character never changes, but for us there is always something new in Him to discover. His depth is infinite.
So, we have a choice. Stay in the box where it’s comfortable or crack open the lid, poke our head out and see what new thing God might be pulling us towards. Then we take a step of faith…then another…then another, until we find ourselves growing in ways we couldn’t have foreseen. The challenge is enjoying the level we’re at but never getting so comfortable that we say “this is good enough”. If we choose to do that, we’re settling for less than the full God experience, and He certainly does long for us to experience all that He has for us…not just some of it!