Comfort Zones

As a leader at a restaurant, I often train people or watch people get trained, and there's one thing I always look for - the size on someone's comfort zone. People who have small comfort zones have a difficult time leaving that small safety net. There's so little that makes them comfortable that they desperately cling to it. But this increases the time of training. It takes longer to include our training into the comfort zone, or longer to get the person to get out of that comfort zone. People with big zones, however, are a breeze to train. They're willing to try something new. Willing and eager to extend their knowledge. Unafraid, unashamed.

When I graduated high school in 2009, my comfort zone was ridiculously tiny. Miniscule, even. But the thing about comfort zones is that God didn't create us to live in them. God didn't create them at all - we did. Man created comfort zones to avoid fear, to avoid the unknown. Man created comfort zones because he was unwilling to accept that he was capable of doing things that he had never seen himself do before. More importantly, he was unwilling to accept that God was capable of helping him do things he'd never seen himself do before. In the past five years, God has slowly but deliberately stretched my comfort zone. I work in the food industry - a place where over an over again I have to talk to people I don't know. For an introvert like myself, that's automatically outside of the zone. I've had big life changes. I changed schools 3 times in the past 5 years (4 if you include graduating high school). I changed jobs 3 times (if you include one job being with the same company but at another location). I got married. If marriage doesn't bring you outside of your comfort zone, you can just quit reading now. (Or maybe seek some counseling, because you might be a little controlling.)

The point is, God is constantly pulling us outside of our comfort zones. I read about it today in 1 Kings 17-20. Elijah was pulled out of his comfort zone multiple times. After telling King Ahab that it would not rain, Elijah was forced into hiding where ravens brought him bread and meat and he had to drink out of a brook. When the brook dried up, he had to seek a widow who provided food for him until God told him it would rain again. Then he had to go back to the king who wanted to kill him and give him the news that rain would return. None of that sounds comfortable to me.

Think about all of the trust that that involved. He trusted that God would provide food delivery from birds. He sat there and watched the brook dry up and trusted that God would provide another way of survival. When he found the widow, she told him that she only had enough food for her last meal - yet the food was stretched out and Elijah had to trust that God would continue to stretch the oil and wheat. When he had to return to King Ahab, he trusted that God would prevent Ahab from killing him immediately.

Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." There's nothing in there about being sure of what we already have, knowing it will be there tomorrow. There's nothing in there about making sure we have everything we need, nothing about avoiding uncomfortable situations.

God doesn't call us to be comfortable. Fact is, if you're comfortable, it's time to switch things up. If you're comfortable, are you growing? If you're comfortable, are you learning? Now, this is not to say that there is no value in rest, because God also calls us to rest. He calls us to lean on Him and He provides for us when we're weary. I'm not talking about resting though. God calls us to rest when we've been pursuing the Kingdom of God so hard that we have exhausted ourselves. He calls us to rest after we've stretched our comfort zones.

What does your comfort zone look like? What is frightening about the phrase "furthering the Kingdom of God"? What is it that you really, really hope God doesn't call you to do? I'll be honest, in high school when I went to youth group, I hoped so much that God would never call me up in front of people. And sure enough, last year He called me to a ministry that involves standing in front of a group of 120+ teenagers and speaking about the love of God. Never in a million years did I think God would call me to speak. I hoped He wouldn't. But after I've done this, I can say that it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. Now I have a new skill that I never thought I would have before, and my ministry opportunities have multiplied because of it.  I can use this skill for the rest of my life. And they never pointed and laughed at me for getting tongue tied or swallowing my tongue in the middle of the sentence. They never knew that I skipped a bullet point, it never really mattered. What mattered was willingness to expand my comfort zone.

What is God calling you to do today? Could your comfort zone use little expanding?