Comfort is a good and troubling thing.

Comfort, on its own is not a bad thing. Humans like comfort. And for good reasons. The alternative, pain, is just unpleasant. But I think it’s much more complicated than that. Like most things, too much of a good thing can turn out to be not so good. That’s true of comfort as well. We can comfort our way to death. When comfort becomes our overriding agenda and motive, we can lose sight of important things. Comfort isn’t a bad thing, but it’s certainly not a good goal. Things that are worth while are done by putting comfort on the side.

Comfort is good for when we need a break sometimes. Other times it can cause us more harm because we become slack and lost momentum. Comfort can give us an emotional boost. And it can be a crutch that distracts us from reality.

In some ways comfort is killing us — our planet, our churches, our economy, etc. We can be so comfortable that we push away pain which is warning us of worse things. Pain is a form of communication that gives us vital information about the health of our bodies and organizations. Ignore or cover up the pain and things are likely to get worse. But we can’t improve them until we engage in the pain and listen to what it has to say to us.

Comfort in church is great when we have a loss of a loved one. It’s not healthy though when we use it to shield us from needed changes. Transformation isn’t comfortable, but it is life giving. Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Too often we like to generalize this and think that…