The Gift of Uncomfortable.

This week I’m looking back on some of the amazing God has let me have this year. Here’s one of my favorite posts from July. The gift of uncomfortable.

I wake up Sunday morning and gaze out at the sunlit meadows outside the living-room windows, and I just stare. Mostly because I just woke up, but also because I know that this is beauty defined and for whatever reason right now, I get to live here. Right in the middle of beautiful. Smack in the midst of serene.

I wonder where the horses are, the ones that usually graze that meadow just south of our flat in the country, and I think about how much I don’t know of this place I now call home. I realize I have no idea where that road beyond the meadow leads. I don’t even know if that’s really south. Maybe it’s east. Or west. Maybe when I see those horses, I look towards home.

I open my journal to the next empty space, grab my Bible and a pen and my copy of Jesus Calling. I come back here every morning first thing. Not because I feel like I should or because I want to impress God or anything. I come back here every morning first thing because in all honesty I know I will face all kinds of uncomfortable today, and I don’t know how I can. And coming here, “relaxing in the company of God” is really the only comfortable I feel like I still have. And that is how I want to start my every today. In the lap of comfortable, even here in this land of so much uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong — I have my family here with me in this land where dogs don’t need leashes and people keep track of them anyway. I have the other half of me, in the form of my husband, who stays constant and faithful and loves me always and no matter what. And I have the two girlies whose giggles and kisses and naked Barbies keep me sane and insane and laughing, too. But the comfortable of life that I knew just six weeks ago, the stuff I didn’t even know I relied on to make me feel ”at home” is mostly gone for now. So I open my Bible to hear God’s familiar voice, and I can relax in the company of God Himself.

In quietness and trust is your strength. (Isaiah 30:15)

And six weeks into this adventure, what I know of comfortable has become words on a page. Word of God on pages.

I feel many emotions as I walk this adventure. Invigorated. Breathless. Excited. Amazed. Afraid. But rarely do I feel comfortable. Because, although so much is the same in this land of the Deutsch, nearly everything feels different. Because tiny details like how to get gasoline are foreign and different, and some days I just want it to be easy. Like asking for the bill at the local pizzeria. Or ordering 800 grams of ground beef from the deli counter. When I face these everyday tasks, I remember that what I know of comfortable is nowhere near me for now.

I realize that this is a gift — this opportunity to live here in this beautiful place where the people are so kind and the hills are so grand. Believe me, I know this. But please realize for me that leaving what I know of comfortable was one of the most difficult things I have had to do in my adult life. Because I like my life in the States. Oh, and I really like to be comfortable. Stretching is hard, and I don’t like exercise. And that is what many days feel like. The kind of exercise that builds endurance — the running up hills kind that hurts the lungs and the quads and the abs (thank you, my friend, for that perfect analogy).

But what I know of comfortable is now gone forever. Because, although I will go home next year, I know that the stretching and the endurance-building and this vacation away from comfortable is making me okay with living outside of my comfort-zone. Forever. It’s tearing away the roots I have grown in the comfortable that I have sadly come to rely on. If I am completely honest, I have to admit that what I know of comfortable has held me back from what I don’t know of living. And I am not okay with that.

So I look for comfortable redefined until what I know of comfortable one day becomes uncomfortable. And I look for the real living even as I linger outside the comfortable, and I know I will find it.