Steadfast, or Stagnant?
Letters for the Road: June 2024
Dear reader,
Recently, I was asked what I thought were some obstacles to the Gospel in the secular West. What came to mind was something that I’ve been thinking about over the past several months: comfort.
By ‘comfort,’ I mean a sense of self-satisfaction and ease that is not inconvenienced. This kind of comfort makes decisions based on what increases our experience of pleasure and decreases our experience of pain. And while my response then identified comfort as a problem out there—in secular communities, among secular individuals–in writing now, I have the magnifying lens turned on my own heart.
The devotional app that I use prompted my self-examination through a meditation on the Song of Songs. “Arise, my love, and come,” the beloved calls to the Shulamite (2:10). The devotional, taking as the premise that God invites us to step out of comfort, asked several questions:
Am I too comfortable these days? Too domesticated?
Has my steadfastness become stagnancy?
Has my peacefulness become sleepiness?
I have found these questions challenging. If I’m honest, my current circumstance of cross-cultural living, pursued in response to God’s call, has the potential of inoculating me to further calls to obedience. The danger of having done something difficult is that I treat it as an item on my checklist of faith: successfully ticked off, completed. I’ve earned my ‘uncomfortable for the Gospel’ badge and don’t need to think about it any longer.
Especially given something physically and obviously disruptive, something that took years of planning, it can be tempting to avoid the smaller expressions of sacrifice.
In Claire Keegan’s brilliant novella Small Things Like These, the main character, Bill, faces such a decision about the comfort of his own family. Confronted with horrible injustice and suffering quite close to home, he could continue, like he and his neighbours have for so long, to shut his eyes to what was happening. Indeed, his social standing and his daughters’ futures depend on him doing just that.
I won’t spoil the story for you, but what I love about Keegan’s writing is how easy she makes silence and indifference seem. There are no incentives for Bill to act against his own comfort—a reality that we in the secular West face every day. Yet his decision is given an incredible weight of significance: his integrity rests on it, and doing nothing will have its own consequences for his soul.
Yet, comfort is also something that Scripture speaks of as something to desire, as a good gift that God gives, and gives abundantly through the incarnation of his Son. God’s tender love and care for his people comfort us in a way that sustains us through difficulty.
The difference, of course, is that the comfort that the Scriptures speak of as necessary for our hearts is not a material comfort, or a right not to be inconvenienced. This does not mean that our material things are unimportant: Christ judges our love for our neighbours through our response to their material needs. But often our material comfort can deceive us: it can mask our spiritual neediness. More than that, we can recoil from Christ’s call, “Arise my love, and come,” because we are comfortable where we are.
The comfort that Christ brings is not the comfort we find curling up by the fire and dozing off (as lovely as that experience is!). Instead, it is a comfort that stirs us to hope and to expectation. Christ’s comfort reminds us that God has not abandoned the world, but has indeed acted to save us. Christ comforts us by defeating our great enemies of sin and death.
This comfort ought not to tranquilize us, but rouse us to pursue our beloved. In pursuing him, we may sacrifice things that our culture finds essential: social status, wealth, security. But in doing so, we become more like the one who was made poor, who was despised and suffered for our sake. And, following him in suffering, will we not also be glorified with him?
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Lord God, heavenly Father,
in your fatherly grace you did not spare your only Son
but gave him up to death on the cross.
Pour your Holy Spirit into our hearts
that we may find our highest comfort in your grace.
Protect us from temptations to sin more,
and help us patiently bear whatever hardships may come,
so that through him we may have eternal life.
-Veit Dietrich
On the road with you,
Laura