Complacency

We've all experienced it. We all become quite comfortable with it. Things are going okay. Life is "working." We're "getting by." But is there danger in becoming too comfortable? With being so okay with where we are and what we know that we cease to strive for something greater? What if we're hanging onto what is good - or even what isn't so good but it's what we know - because of the fear of what we will have to endure in order to reach what's better?

I've been reading "A Passion for the Impossible," a fantastic biography on Lilias Trotter, a single missionary to Algeria in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The following is an excerpt from her journal:

The martens have been reading me a faith lesson... one slept in my room last night and another darted in at the open window before I was up, swept round and out again.

Their faith lesson is this - that their wings need the sense of "an empty void" below to give them a start - their leg muscles have no spring in them and when they perch by accident on a level place they are stuck fast - poor things we did not know that natural history fact in the past and when we have found them on our flat Alger roof with its parapet protection, we have thought they had got hurt somehow, and more than once we have tried to feed them till they died, instead of doing the one thing that they needed - tossing them off into emptiness.

So we need not wonder if we are not allowed to stay longer in level sheltered places - our faith wings are like the martens and mostly need the gulf of some emergency to give them their start on a new flight. We will not fear when we feel empty air under them.

Because God knows we are fearful and weak, He sometimes provides whatever is necessary to take us out of our comfortable complacency, put us on our knees, in His arms, and fully dependent on Him. Only then is He able to accomplish through us that which we could never do on our own.

"For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." - (Ephesians 2:10)

It may be frightening to step out of that comfort zone now, to adjust our lives to grow closer to God or to make an all out "leap of faith," but just as the marten has a confident hope in the ability to take flight after a leap into an unknown void, "we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Sprit, whom he has given us." (Romans 5:3-5)