Leaving Our Comfort Zone

Leaving Our Comfort Zone

Acts 9:1-19

            When my wife was a high school guidance counselor, she put a sign on her office door that read,” There will be a $5 charge for whining.”  She says there was one student who walked in frequently with a five-dollar bill in his hand.  He needed to whine, and he was willing to pay the price.  (Just to be clear:  she didn’t charge him, and she did listen.)

            Poor Sallie (Charlie Brown’s little sister).  She’s the classic whiner.  Sallie whines about a lot of things.  In one Peanuts comic strip she whines about going on a school field trip.  “Oh, I hate field trips…” she says.  “I always get sick on the bus.  Why do we have to go on field trips?”  Then she says, “Why can’t we just stay in school and mind our own business?  Why should we bother the outside world?”  Why indeed?

            We’re a lot like Sallie, aren’t we?  We like to stay in our comfort zone, among the people we know and like; surrounded by familiar objects; going to familiar places.  Sure, we like occasional variety, as long as it’s not too much, or too different, or too chance-taking.  After all, if we try that new restaurant across town, the one with the weird name, and we don’t like the food, we’re out a bunch of money and we’ve wasted an evening.  Who wants to do that?

            That sounds like Saul.  He came to Jerusalem to be with people who believed as he did, who thought and spoke like he did, who read the same books in the same way he did.  He was going to be a Pharisee and be just like all the other Pharisees.  Then he did something different.

            Trying to be the best Pharisee he could, the best defender of the Torah, he asked permission to go to the city of Damascus to arrest anyone who was a follower of the recently-executed Jesus Christ.  He’d show those other Pharisees he was no slouch! 

Things didn’t work out the way he’d planned.  On the road to Damascus he encountered Jesus, the one whose followers he was going to arrest.  His life was changed.  Jesus called him to be the apostle to the Gentiles.  For a Jew, you can’t find anyone more different than a Gentile.  Jews weren’t even supposed to be near Gentiles, let alone talk to them; let alone carry on full-blown conversations with them; let alone try to convert them to a religion he was just beginning to understand.

And yet this is what God called him to do.  And what a job he did! With a new name (Paul), a new religious outlook, and a new ministry, he, along with a handful of other missionaries spread the gospel throughout much of the pagan world.  Instead of refusing God’s call and staying in his comfort zone, he launched out into the deep, and in doing so helped change Christianity from a small, little-known Jewish sect with little influence to the world’s largest religion.

In the same way and for much the same reasons, God calls us to leave our comfort zones and launch out into the deep.  It may be the deep of an unfamiliar culture, or a new occupation, or a new city.  It may be a new way of looking at the gospel, or at people, or at the world.  But whatever it is, it’s God’s call, and we must answer.

“The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled lane with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook.  And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.”

Florence Luscomb, the author of these words, understood how small our lives can be in our comfort zone.  God calls us to a larger zone.  It may not be comfortable—at least at first, but if we allow God to guide us, as Paul did, we will find great reward, and eventually, the comfort of knowing we’ve done what God asked.