MTV Cribs: Welcome to My Comfort Zone

I have survived things I once thought would kill me.

& that sounds really beautiful until God asks me what I picked up while I was surviving.

Because apparently we were not going to have a cute little devotional this morning.

Apparently we were conducting an inventory.

& I would like to formally state for the record that I did not authorize the search.

I have spent years telling the story of what God brought me through. Abuse. Trauma. Betrayal. Loss. Rejection. Disappointment. Seasons where I had to become strong because being anything else did not feel like an available option. I have looked backward at versions of myself that were carrying more than they had language for & marveled that somehow, by the grace of God, I am still here.

That testimony is true.

God kept me.

God carried me.

God protected pieces of me I didn’t even know were breaking.

But there is another question I haven’t always been as eager to ask:

What did I carry out with me?

Because apparently you can come out of Egypt & still have some Egyptian jewelry in your bag.

You can survive the fire & still smell like smoke.

You can overcome the thing & unknowingly build your life around never having to feel anything like it again.

& somewhere between survival & healing, I think I made an agreement with comfort.

Nothing official, of course.

There was no ceremony.

No golden calf.

No incense burning in the living room.

I didn’t wake up one Tuesday & announce, “Good morning, everyone. I have decided to participate in idolatry.”

That would have at least been easier to identify.

Mine was quieter.

Mine looked responsible.

Mine looked like boundaries sometimes.

Planning.

Predictability.

Self-protection.

Knowing what happens next.

Controlling what I could control because there had been so many seasons of my life when I couldn’t control anything.

& if I’m painfully truthful, somewhere deep inside of me grew this belief that after everything I had survived, maybe I had earned the right to be comfortable.

I had done my time.

Surely there was a spiritual retirement package somewhere.

Surely heaven had reviewed my file & determined that I had accumulated enough trauma points to qualify for the premium package with reduced suffering, predictable outcomes, agreeable people & complimentary emotional stability.

I wanted God.

I just also wanted God to stop disrupting things.

Which is an absolutely wild sentence to write.

Because I say I want the life Jesus promised.

I quote it.

I sing about it.

I underline it.

I highlight it.

I post it.

I own enough pens specifically designated for Bible study to qualify as a small office-supply chain.

But lately God has been confronting me with the dissonance of quoting a life I am not fully possessing.

Jesus said in John 10:10 that He came so that we “may have life, and have it to the full.”

Not merely existence.

Not survival with Christian accessories.

Not a carefully managed life where I have eliminated every possible opportunity for disappointment.

Life.

& the life He offers is not merely possessed through principles.

It is possessed in Presence.

That distinction has been bothering me.

Because principles can be studied without surrender.

Principles can be organized.

Principles can be highlighted.

Principles can fit very nicely inside my plans.

Presence cannot be managed that way.

The presence of God is not God becoming an accessory to the life I have already decided to live. It is God becoming the defining reality of it.

& His glory is not merely emotional energy.

It isn’t goosebumps during worship.

It isn’t the moment the keyboard player finds that chord & suddenly everybody in the sanctuary has one hand up.

It isn’t spiritual adrenaline.

Glory carries weight.

The glory of God exposes what cannot coexist comfortably with His holiness. It evicts things that have been quietly subletting rooms in my heart. It elevates my awareness of Him until things I previously tolerated begin making me uncomfortable.

Which is inconvenient when comfort itself is the tenant God is trying to evict.

& then I met David again.

2 Samuel 5:17–25 opens with David finally arriving at something that had been spoken over his life long before he occupied it.

He is anointed king.

This should be the celebration scene.

Cue the soundtrack.

Roll the slow-motion montage.

David has arrived.

Except Scripture says:

“When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over Israel, they went up in full force to search for him.”
—2 Samuel 5:17, NIV

Excuse me?

He gets anointed & then gets attacked?

There wasn’t even a grace period?

No complimentary 30-day trial of kingship?

The Philistines heard about the elevation & immediately came looking for him.

& while I don’t want to put words into the text that aren’t there, I cannot ignore what that sequence exposes in me: I have sometimes interpreted opposition as evidence that I must have missed God, when Scripture repeatedly shows people encountering resistance while standing directly inside what God called them to do.

Sometimes elevation comes with additional responsibility.

Sometimes what worked in one season cannot accompany me into another.

Sometimes there are behaviors that become increasingly incompatible with where God is taking me.

& that terrifies the part of me that wants calling without cost.

I want anointing with amenities.

Purpose with preferred seating.

Elevation with an elevator.

I would very much like to skip the stairs.

But David does something in 2 Samuel 5:17–25 that keeps arresting me.

He inquires of the Lord.

The Philistines are coming.

David is a warrior.

This is not his first fight.

He has killed lions & bears. He has defeated Goliath. Warfare is quite literally on this man’s résumé.

Yet his ability does not become God’s authorization.

David still asks.

“Shall I go and attack the Philistines?”

& God answers him.

David wins.

Then they come again.

& David asks again.

This time, God gives him a different strategy.

That humbled me.

Because sometimes my greatest temptation is not doing something blatantly sinful.

It is doing something I am perfectly capable of doing without asking God if He wants me to do it.

I know how to survive.

I know how to protect myself.

I know how to read a room.

I know how to withdraw.

I know how to prepare for disappointment before disappointment even knows it’s coming.

Baby, I have contingency plans for my contingency plans.

If emotional preparedness were an Olympic event, please stand for the national anthem.

But ability is not authorization.

& yesterday’s strategy is not automatically today’s instruction.

David calls the place Baal Perazim—“the Lord who breaks through.”

& I love breakthrough.

I just don’t always love the method God chooses to break through.

Because sometimes the thing He has to break through first is me.

My habits.

My defenses.

My insistence on knowing.

My obsession with predictability.

My appetite for comfort.

& this is where Scripture gets painfully interesting.

After the victory, the Philistines abandon their idols, & David & his men carry them off.

& I found myself thinking about the strange possibility of acquiring victories while accumulating idols.

Because surviving something does not automatically mean I walked away empty-handed.

I survived abuse.

But did I carry hyper-independence out with me?

I survived betrayal.

But did I pick up suspicion?

I survived instability.

But did I begin worshiping predictability?

I survived situations where I had very little control.

But did control eventually become the thing that made me feel safest?

I survived discomfort.

& somewhere along the road, did I make comfort my god?

Whew.

Alexa, play absolutely nothing.

We need silence.

Because idols are not always intentional.

Most of mine probably weren’t.

I didn’t deliberately choose them.

I adapted.

I survived.

I learned what reduced pain & repeated it.

& when something worked, I kept it.

That is what makes this so uncomfortable.

Some of the things God is asking me to surrender were once strategies that helped me survive.

& I am grateful they got me here.

But “this helped me survive there” is not the same thing as “God wants me to carry this here.”

Then we get to 2 Samuel 6:6–7.

& if 2 Samuel 5:17–25 stepped on my toes, 2 Samuel 6:6–7 apparently backed the entire church van over them.

David wants to bring the ark of God to Jerusalem.

The ark represented God’s covenant presence among His people.

& everybody is celebrating.

There is music.

There is shouting.

There is enthusiasm.

There is movement.

There is religious activity everywhere.

This thing looks like revival.

Except there is a problem.

They put the ark on a cart.

God had already prescribed how the ark was to be handled. It was to be carried according to His instruction, not transported according to whatever method seemed easiest.

But the cart was convenient.

Efficient.

Practical.

Comfortable.

& apparently those are not synonyms for obedient.

When they reach the threshing floor, the oxen stumble. Uzzah reaches out & takes hold of the ark.

2 Samuel 6:6–7 tells us that God’s anger burned against Uzzah for his irreverent act, & he died there beside the ark.

That passage has always been difficult.

It should be.

God’s holiness is not casual.

But what struck me this time was everything that happened before Uzzah ever reached out his hand.

They had placed holy presence on a convenient system.

They were celebrating.

They were praising.

They were making noise.

They were sincere.

& they were still handling God’s presence contrary to God’s instruction.

That wrecked me.

Because it is possible to have energy without glory.

It is possible to be excited about God while resisting His way.

It is possible to praise loudly while quietly choosing convenience over obedience.

It is possible to love what God is doing while refusing the method God prescribed.

& suddenly I wasn’t studying David anymore.

I was staring at myself.

How many times have I effectively prayed,

“God, I want Your presence.

Your way would just be a little inconvenient.

So I brought a cart.”

My cart is comfort.

My cart is control.

My cart is the schedule.

My cart is needing the conversation to go the way I rehearsed it.

My cart is wanting obedience to fit inside my emotional capacity.

My cart is wanting God to transform me without disturbing me.

& if God could kindly remain within the parameters outlined in the itinerary I prepared, that would be fantastic.

Essentially, I have occasionally treated the Holy Spirit like Mrs. Doubtfire.

Help is on the way, dear!

Come fix this.

Fix them.

Fix the circumstances.

Put out the fire.

Restore order to this chaotic household.

But please don’t start opening cabinets.

Because there are things in there.

God, however, keeps opening cabinets.

& apparently He found comfort sitting on the throne wearing a little crown.

Cute.

Embarrassing.

Moving on.

Except God isn’t moving on.

Because what happens next may be one of the greatest spiritual mic drops in David’s life.

David gets angry.

Then afraid.

Then he leaves the ark elsewhere for a time.

But eventually David learns.

& when he understands that they had approached God’s presence wrongly, he changes how he approaches it.

Later, 1 Chronicles 15:13 gives even more detail to this same event. David acknowledges that they had not inquired of God about how to bring the ark according to His prescribed way.

David did not simply feel bad.

He corrected the posture.

& when the ark begins moving again in 2 Samuel 6, this time those carrying it take six steps & David sacrifices before the Lord.

Once he knew better, he made it right.

Mic.

Drop.

Because I think one of my favorite ways to avoid conviction is to turn revelation into shame.

I discover something ugly in myself & immediately make the discovery my identity.

How could I have done this?

How long have I been like this?

Am I terrible?

Have I ruined everything?

Meanwhile David’s response essentially says:

Okay. I was wrong.

Now let me honor God correctly.

No twelve-part shame documentary.

No three-season Netflix limited series titled The Fall of David: How One Cart Ruined Everything.

He learned.

He adjusted.

He obeyed.

& perhaps that is what repentance actually looks like more often than I have allowed myself to believe.

Not self-hatred.

Not theatrics.

Not endlessly punishing myself because I finally saw what God had been trying to show me.

Correction.

If I discover that comfort has become an idol, my responsibility is not to hate myself for needing safety after living through unsafe things.

My responsibility is to stop asking comfort to do what only God can do.

That distinction matters deeply to me.

Because comfort itself is not evil.

Rest is biblical.

Safety is beautiful.

Peace is a gift.

Home can be sacred.

Predictability can be helpful.

Boundaries can be necessary.

But good things become dangerous things when I ask them to give me what belongs exclusively to God.

Comfort cannot be my refuge.

Control cannot be my peace.

Predictability cannot be my security.

People cannot be my proof that I am loved.

& an easy life cannot be my evidence that God is pleased with me.

I think that is the idol God is exposing.

Not my couch.

Not my coffee.

& thank You, Jesus, because I have invested considerably in these syrups.

The idol is my demand that life remain emotionally manageable before I will call God good.

It is the quiet expectation that obedience should not cost too much.

It is my tendency to believe discomfort means something has gone wrong.

It is wanting resurrection without burial.

Breakthrough without breaking.

Anointing without opposition.

Glory without weight.

Presence without surrender.

I cannot keep quoting a life I refuse to possess.

I cannot say I want a vibrant, passionate, intimate relationship with God that produces a contagious, countercultural, unforgettable life while simultaneously arranging my entire existence around avoiding discomfort.

Countercultural living will cost me cultural comfort.

A contagious life requires exposure.

Once you’ve encountered the presence of God deeply enough, you cannot pretend you haven’t.

& a commemorative life—a life that leaves an imprint—will almost certainly require me to go places comfort would never choose.

Maybe that is why this feels so personal.

I have an appetite for my calling.

& those who want more cannot continue living as though they were called to remain exactly where they are.

There are versions of me that were necessary for survival but cannot lead me into promise.

There are coping mechanisms I can thank for their service & still retire.

There are protective instincts that once kept me alive but now keep me unavailable.

There are comfortable patterns that feel like peace simply because they are familiar.

& there are things I have mistaken for personality that God may actually be asking me to surrender.

That doesn’t make me evil.

It means I’m in a war.

& spiritual warfare is not always as obvious as some dramatic attack from the enemy.

Sometimes the most dangerous exchanges are counterfeit versions of things God actually wants to give me.

Control masquerading as peace.

Isolation masquerading as protection.

Comfort masquerading as rest.

Avoidance masquerading as boundaries.

Familiarity masquerading as safety.

God offers the real thing.

I keep reaching for the cheaper version because I can control the packaging.

& maybe the invitation now is brutally simple:

God, Your presence. Your way.

Not my cart.

Not my timeline.

Not my preferred method.

Not my carefully curated emotional temperature.

Your presence.

Your way.

Hebrews 13:15 calls praise a sacrifice.

& sacrifice means praise will not always arrive when I feel like praising.

There is no rank in warfare, but there is also no rank in praise.

My title does not exempt me.

My calling does not exempt me.

My history does not exempt me.

& perhaps hardest of all:

my trauma does not get to become permission for my idols.

It can explain why I reached for them.

It can help me understand why comfort became so seductive.

It can give me compassion for the woman who learned to survive by controlling whatever she could.

But it cannot be the reason I refuse to release what God is now asking me to put down.

I survived.

That is part of my testimony.

But survival was never supposed to become the ceiling of my life.

Jesus didn’t only come to keep me alive.

He came that I would have life.

Full life.

Abundant life.

A life saturated with His presence rather than organized around the prevention of pain.

& maybe this is the season where God isn’t asking me to survive another thing.

Maybe He’s teaching me how to stop living like I’m still in everything I already survived.

Maybe the next level of freedom isn’t another enemy falling.

Maybe it’s an idol.

Maybe Baal Perazim—the God who breaks through—is breaking through the walls I built after He brought me out.

& perhaps the deepest breakthrough of all is realizing that the walls that once protected me can eventually become the walls that imprison me.

So here I am.

A woman who has overcome more than she sometimes knows how to articulate.

A woman who has been carried by God through things she did not deserve.

A woman who learned how to survive.

A woman who also, apparently, collected a few idols along the way.

& now the same God who delivered me from what happened to me is lovingly confronting what developed in me.

That might be the part of deliverance we don’t put on t-shirts.

But maybe it is the holiest part.

Because I don’t just want to quote this life anymore.

I want to possess it.

I don’t want the appearance of presence.

I want Presence.

I don’t want energy.

I want glory.

I don’t want a convenient cart carrying something I claim is sacred.

I want God.

His presence.

His way.

Even when His way costs me my comfort.

Especially when His way costs me my comfort.

Because David showed me something I desperately needed to remember:

Getting it wrong does not have to be the end of the story.

When God shows me the idol, I can put it down.

When He exposes the cart, I can change how I carry what is holy.

When He corrects me, I can move differently.

When I know better, I can make it right.

& maybe that is today’s mic drop.

Or, considering everything God just knocked off the shelves of my heart…

mic & idol drop.