Being Comfortable is Not Always Good

One week and 3 days ago I moved into Jenny’s house. Remember Jenny? She’s the one I talked about in my last post. Well, her roommate left Cambodia and it’s not very safe for a single young woman to live on her own, so I moved in with her for the last 2.5 weeks of her stay in Cambodia. She’s leaving August 20th, 4 days before me. After she moves out, I will move back in with my host family for the last few days. Anyway, I’m living with Jenny now, and let me tell you, we are having SO MUCH fun! Cooking, shopping, laughing, watching Gilmore Girls and other movies, eating yummy homemade desserts, dancing to Singing in the Rain – we have fun. What a blessing this change has been! I feel like God has been really gracious in giving me this experience right at the end of my time. It’s part of my transition back into American culture.

And yet, I believe God has blessed me with this experience for a different reason too. I am becoming complacent. This life – living like an American with an American roommate doing American things – is easy. Too easy. I have pulled away from Jesus during this time I have been at Jenny’s. Not intentionally, but it has happened. See, I don’t need Jesus as much since I don’t have daily frustrations from my host brother and sister or my host parents. I feel completely comfortable in her house, which was not necessarily true at my host family’s home. I don’t have to rely on Jesus for strength, which is a significant step back from my experience back in June when I was crying on the floor at work, at the end of my strength, and asking God to take over because I just couldn’t do it anymore. Yes, that time hurt and was hard and I would not want to do that again. And yet, I felt much more held by Jesus during that time. Now (by my own doing), I can kind of forget about Him if I wanted to.

Obviously, I don’t want to, and I will not just forget about him. But feeling so comfortable (I think maybe complacent is a better word) is not doing me much good. God is showing me that this is God’s way of preparing me to enter back into American culture. I have been praying for that for months – that God would prepare me for whatever my transition back will look like. I think He is giving me a small glimpse of part of it, and it’s not looking good. I don’t want to go back and be so comfortable being back home that it’s easy for me to have unintentional times with Jesus in the morning. I’m still spending time with Him, but it’s nothing personal…just reading Jesus Calling, reading my Bible, and reading whatever inspirational Christian living book I am reading at the time. But it’s not personal, and I miss that. So I’m working on it – working on talking to Jesus more.

You know what else this has made me think about? My whole life ahead of me. If I am going to live in the United States for my whole life, the chance of me having many more seasons of feeling “comfortable” are going to be many. I don’t want that. I want to push forward with passion. I want to seek Jesus just for the sake of hearing his beautiful voice speak to me in little ways. I want my life to be one that radiates Jesus because of the presence of His light in my heart every morning. And so I think I need to make a conscious effort to make myself uncomfortable. When I sense myself becoming complacent in my life, I need to force myself to go out and serve in a way that may not be my favorite thing to do. I don’t quite know what that looks like yet. Hopefully after having a chat with Jesus at one of those necessary times, He will give me a little hint as to what would bless Him. But I need to force myself to be uncomfortable. If I don’t, I will end up being a lukewarm Christian for much of my life. And I am just not at all okay with that. I want to need to trust God in every moment of my life.

Let’s work at pushing ourselves to not be comfortable or complacent. Let’s really seek Jesus, and when we start to get comfortable, let’s change some things around in our lives.