Out of Your Comfort Zone

Are you on a steep learning curve? Or are you feeling you are in a comfortable rut where life is a steady routine and each day is fairly predictable? It seems that we are never too old to learn new things in God’s Kingdom, even in our 70s. My husband and I recently started going to a new church and, apart from having the challenge of trying to remember lots of new names each week, we have been attending a leadership training course there once a month.

Each month we are given new challenges to ponder, discuss in groups, and to pray about with a prayer ‘buddy’. So far we have had topics such as personal spirituality, differing leadership styles, and blind spots. We are encouraged to have a goal in mind for what we would like to change in our life by the end of the year.

So I was greatly blessed recently to discover this statement made by a president of a university in America, ‘Learning is the antithesis of comfort’. Not all learning in university is going to be about the knowledge of factual information or intellectual matters. Each one of us has been created with a spirit and a soul as well as a body, and within our soul we have a mind, a will and our emotions. We are affected in all these parts of our being as we enter into new relationships. There is a collision of world views and ideologies as we meet people with vastly different experiences of life from our own. It shakes us out of our complacency and can be exciting and stimulating as well as stretching.

In the second chapter of 1 Corinthians the apostle Paul writes about spiritual wisdom. ‘And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God’ ‭‭(1 Corinthians‬ ‭2:1-5‬).‬‬‬

Paul goes on to explain how we learn important truths in God’s Kingdom by the Holy Spirit. ‘The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned’ ‭‭(1 Corinthians ‭2:14‬). I was thirty years old when I first began reading the bible and went once a week to a group of people to study the gospel of Mark. Almost immediately I realised my great ignorance of spiritual things and it felt as if I had gone back to kindergarten. I had been born again and was just a spiritual baby. How grateful I am to those who nurtured me and helped me to grow!‬‬‬

The exciting thing about God’s Kingdom is that we can begin passing on what we learn to others. What we are learning from the Holy Spirit is life changing for us and for others. It’s too good to keep to ourselves. ‘And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual’ (1 Corinthians ‭2:13‬).‬

Prayer: Dear heavenly Father, please help me to learn new things in Your Kingdom. I thank You that You have many exciting adventures in store for me. I don’t want to become limited to what I learnt in the past. I want to be open to those new things that You have for me and yet hanging on to the most important thing of all, ‘Jesus Christ and Him crucified’. Help me to keep the main thing the main thing, in Jesus’ name, Amen.