Change is your friend!

                I wrote several posts ago about finding change on the floor of my bus now that I transport middle and high school students. I find it every day. I am still surprised. I forget that these are not elementary students who would throw down over a quarter and go to war over a dollar. The quarter equaled candy at school and the dollar ice cream. Come to think of it I would throw down too over candy and ice cream. It seems older students are not so inclined so it goes in our coke can bank for our Operation Christmas Child Shoe Boxes. That kind of change is my friend.

                We all know that the kind of change that involves disturbing our lives or lifestyles is NOT our friend or so we believe. Change like that will take us out of our comfortableness of what we have known. We don’t like that as a rule. Some do, but most not at all even though change is constant. I think this is a first world problem and particularly so in North America. We like and cherish comfortable and hate, despise and thwart any and all change all because it threatens our comfort, and our comfortable life.

                I have spent some time this week thinking about comfort and being comfortable. As much as I like to be comfortable and in comfort, I wonder if it the best thing for me? Is comfort my friend or enemy? The following is a list of ways comfort or comfortable is my enemy: 1) It demotivates innovation. Why make something better “that ain’t broke?” 2) It is opposed to change. 3) It stops growth. It makes it a non-starter. 4) It stifles entrepreneurship. Why do anything different? 5) It halts conquest. 6) It avoids a challenge. Consider those qualities, hallmarks of Americans and America, qualities we state with pride yet comfort and comfortable will stop them dead in their tracks. Our comfort and comfortable lifestyle is an enemy to our spiritual progress as well. When God called Abram, God was calling Abram from his comfort. The Lord said to Abram: Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. Gen 12:1 (HCSB).               

I have underlined the three areas that make us comfortable but also hold is back from the greater possibility in the Kingdom of God. Abram had to leave his comfort of those people and places to become the father of a great nation, a man of great faith and the first in the lineage of the Messiah. He could not become all God had in store until he left his comfort and embraced change. The REAL challenge with change is a spiritual. One of comfort vs. faith. Comfort represents what we know and believe we have obtained through our own efforts (It’s not really true). Change requires obeying when we do not know where, how, when, and why but must trust and believe God.

Abram believed God.

⁶ Abram believed the Lord, and He credited it to him as righteousness. Gen 15:6 (HCSB)

What about you?

In HIS Service and Yours;                                      

BroG

P.S. No change this morning but the day is young!