E-mail of Encouragement to a Friend

Yesterday, my wonderful wife and I along with two friends had the privilege to help pack 10,000 meals with Restore Church in Silver Spring, MD.  The meals are to be given to two schools in Silver Spring, MD where 90% of the students are on the reduced –payment lunch program.  Before this event, one of our friends Meg made some awesome chili and invited us over to her place to relax and hangout.  Meg shared with us about her experiences volunteering for the Girls Club and how challenging it was for her and that it was an intentional decision on her part to embrace discomfort.  It was such a great reminder to me that people are not born with innate talent of addressing needs and that God does not call the qualified, but qualifies the called when we step out of our comfortable spaces.  I have blogged about this several times in the past, because it is a reoccurring theme in my life.  I decided to write Meg and thank her for her candor and to tell her it was an encouragement and good reminder for me.  Reading over the e-mail I thought it might be an encouragement to others so I decided to share it.

Meg,

Thanks for sharing about the Boys and Girls clubs yesterday!  It was particularly good to hear your honesty about the challenge of meeting with the other--culturally other, ethnically other, affluently other, educationally other, other with respect to age.  That so reinforced a theme that has been re-occurring in my life for probably the last two years.  We are a society that is absolutely obsessed with comfort and frankly there may not be a person more apt to choose and desire comfort in his life than me!  Moreover, to put this in spiritual terms I believe the desire for comfort is a very clever as well as successful ploy of the enemy to severe the hands and feet of Christ. 

It would be an interesting experiment, albeit really difficult to do objectively, to take a week and track where I seek comfort and where I intentionally welcome discomfort with the intent of moving closer to God.

Anyway, I love to see that you have stepped up with and embraced being uncomfortable for Kingdom causes with the girls in S.E.  And the fact that you admitted that you were uncomfortable was an encouragement to me.  I think too often we see people doing great things for the world and to the outsider it looks like it just comes natural for them.  I believe that perception is more often than not false.  I believe that if people knew that the people who are taking a stand with the poor, those with AIDS, the drug-addicted, trafficked boys and girls do so intentionally putting them in a lot of discomfort and these tension-dwelling people shared their struggles openly and honestly others would be willing to see themselves as having the potential to make an impact.

I pray that as our small group grows and we see each other stepping out and doing things that disrupt our routine and thus creating tension--tension that we embrace rather than run from, it will mold and shape us into who God wants us to be both as a group and individuals.  I also pray that it will become contagious.  I believe openly and honestly sharing our struggles that we have in tension-filled environments is paramount to making it contagious though.

Peace,

Steve