We naturally crave comfort and familiarity. When we get stressed, we reach out for comfort food. For me that often means a bowl of spaghetti. I know what it is going to taste like, it does not take much effort to enjoy or appreciate it, and it is easy to make and easy to eat. There are times when life gets so hectic that having a bowl of spaghetti is just what I need to calm me and help me through a stressful evening. If I find myself having spaghetti for every meal, though, that is not a particularly healthy diet. It might be easy, but it is not the full range of what I need. Your comfort food might be something different – pot roast, macaroni and cheese, pancakes are some common ones that I’ve heard people mention – but the dynamic is the same. We easily revert to the familiar, and the more stressful our lives are the more we are tempted to stay with what feels comfortable to us. Yet our physical health is enhanced by having a balanced diet, eating healthy foods, and challenging ourselves to expand our horizons to greater variety and foods that are a bit more of a challenge to us to eat.
So too with our spiritual lives. There are most certainly times that we need to be comforted. Such times, though, are more infrequent than we would like. As much as we want continual spiritual comfort, our spiritual health actually depends more on it being regularly challenged so that we build up spiritual endurance. We need to encounter new ideas, new ways of doing things, and new challenges to have a healthy spiritual life. More than that, we need to have our assumptions challenged. In Isaiah, God tells us that God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are beyond our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). Because of this, we must continually be reminded that we are not the center of our religious life. Our thoughts and preferences and assumptions fall short of what God intends and has planned. We need to regularly be challenged to change our life to conform to the surprising grace of God. It is not supposed to be the other way around, insisting that God fit what is comforting to us.
You may have heard the saying, “God comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.” This is most certainly true. More often than we would like, we are the comfortable and need to be challenged. There are moments when what we need from God is comfort, and we should accept that embrace when the time is right. Too easily, though, we stay there. Being open to God, though, means that most of the time we need to be ready to be challenged. Church is not meant to be a comfortable place, at least most of the time. It is meant to be a place where we are met by God. Such meeting shows us that our lives fall short of God’s will, but also shows us God gracious and loving acceptance of us as we are. When we encounter both parts of God, we are changed. That is not comfortable, but it is freeing.