Pain – good. Comfort – bad.

I really don’t know where I was going with this but, as it is with most of my posts, it dragged me out of bed because it was running around inside of my head. If I didn’t get up and type it out, I knew I would lose it so here it is!

As hard as it is to hear, pain is necessary. Pain spurs growth. Many times, in life, we cling to things that are not good for us because we are comfortable with them. It could be a relationship, a home, a job or anything really. We grow accustomed to having things the way they are and we do not like to experience change, even if that change would bring about growth and allow our lives to prosper.

We prune a tree to remove old growth or to promote new growth. The pruning shears remove old parts of the tree that are not needed and that the tree wastes energy trying to maintain. In this act, the shears cause pain and the tree reacts by scarring over where the part was cut. Afterwards, the tree uses the energy that would have been maintaining that old section and creates new growth. That new growth produces more energy than the previous part that was cut away and the entire tree grows stronger.

We are just like that tree. We hang on to things which have outlived their purpose for us because we are comfortable with them. Many times, we do not see what lies beyond the horizon because the old parts of our life block our view. Once that part is gone, and we have scarred over the place where it was, we can see clearly the road ahead and we move to a better place and grow. This is true whether it is physical, emotional, spiritual, or just our current situation.

In life, we get comfortable. Comfort feels good but we don’t notice the harm it causes because that harm is slow to build. We enjoy our comfort foods, our comfortable EZ chair, and our comfortable lifestyle. Slowly, we build a paunch and we don’t really notice that we aren’t able to do everything we used to. We used to jog up 30 stairs. 30 becomes 29, then 28. We start to get winded sooner. We blame it on age. We blame it on old injuries. Slowly but surely, our comfort kills us. Sadly, by the time we realize what we have become, the road back to health is to difficult for us to endure in our current state.

Emotionally, the same thing happens. In a good relationship, there is growth. We provide to each other energy and we as a whole grow stronger. Too often though, we cling to relationships that are not healthy. We do so because we have grown comfortable with them. We have grown to rely on them and we waste energy on them without growth. As time goes on, we allow them to weigh us down and we allow them to sap our energy. Before too long, we start to feel as though we are dead emotionally and in a way we are. We have forgotten what the feeling of being in a healthy relationship is like. We have forgotten about the energy that both people feel when things are good and healthy.

This is a pattern that we find reoccurring in our lives. We grow comfortable with situations because we can’t see what lies beyond them. In our jobs, we get pulled into the nine to five rut because we don’t want to change. Change causes pain and pain is not comfortable. Spiritually we do the same thing. We go through the motions. We check off the boxes: love God, check; love the family, check; don’t lie, check; give to the collection plate, check. We have become comfortable in our religion but religion is in itself the problem. We do all the right things on paper but we forget that our lives are not on paper. Jesus said to his disciples that we are branches and he is the vine. God prunes us so that we bear fruit. Some of the smaller branches may not bear fruit so God will prune that away so that new growth will come. Many times, that pruning will hurt but always bear in mind that with that pain, new growth can happen.