People love to be comfortable. Our relationships, daily routines, faith and perceptions of ourselves are all within our comfort zones. It is a place where nothing can hurt us, but as soon as we step out of these boundaries, we are fair game for the cruelty of reality. As humans, we love to be the leaders of our own lives. We think we know what is best for us and that the best for us is to always stay in our safe bubbles, the known. However, I have recently discovered that the best thing for me has been stepping out of that bubble, entering the unknown, and devoting every move to God’s will, not mine.
Someone once told me that being comfortable ceases growth in our lives and that we should strive to be uncomfortable. At the time, this was just some advice to ponder, but now, after I have reached a new level of being uncomfortable, I understand the truth behind this statement.
Last Sunday I was at 8 a.m. mass. I was very tired and just going through the motions. I was hearing, but I was not listening. When my priest began his homily, he asked how many of us remembered the last six words of the gospel reading, words he had spoken less than a minute prior to his question. When no one remembered, he proceeded to tell us we are too comfortable with our faith. Once we know the order of the mass, memorize all of the prayers, and get into a routine of practicing our faith, we often stop working to strengthen our faith. While we should constantly be striving to get closer to God, we stay trapped in our comfort zone. It’s good enough. A lot of things in life are settled for as good enough.
This is especially relevant to relationships.
Being comfortable in any relationship, whether it is with a significant other, friend, or ourselves, can lead to lack of growth. We become so comfortable with who we are, we stop trying to better ourselves and the people we are with. We think we know all we need to know about someone, so we stop asking questions to get to know their hearts, and we stop growing closer to them. People are so incredibly interesting, and it is such a shame that we settle for what they give us without seeking more. We are convinced that they will be in our lives forever and think we have forever to get to know them. We assume a relationship has met its full potential after a certain amount of time without truly discovering the reason the person is in our lives. We marry someone because we have spent a significant amount of time with them and we are used to being with them. Sometimes, our hope of what a person is to us is completely different from what God intended that person to be for us. That is where it gets difficult and uncomfortable. It is okay to be uncomfortable.
We like to play it safe, not wanting to deal with negative emotions or outcomes of unpleasant conversations. However, if we live comfortably all the time, we never feel the pain or learn the lessons that help us grow into the people we are meant to be. We know the discomfort that comes from cutting ties with people, so we avoid it. We avoid getting out of a relationship because we don’t know what will happen to us if we are not with that person. We don’t want to be alone, and we are comfortable with what we have, so we settle.
Comfort is not the same as joy, and sometimes we have to sacrifice temporary comfort to find the eternal joy our life has in store for us. The journey of life is sometimes not about becoming something, but unbecoming everything that is not truly us, so we can be who we were meant to be in the first place.
