Safety, Comfort, and the Dangerous Calling of Jesus

Years ago in Greenville, Mississippi, I was roofing my house. First house I had ever owned. I got some insurance money and just decided to roof it myself. Every day, after I got home from work, I would get up on the roof and channel my twenty-year-old self that used to roof houses for my uncle. One afternoon I heard something and looked up to see Will, my two-and-a-half-year-old son, in nothing but a diaper, standing a few feet away, grinning. “Hey Daddy.” I panicked. I was trying to figure out how to get to him before he fell off the roof. We were on top of a two-story house, and I was trying to say calm to keep him calm (although he didn’t appear panicked at all!). Slowly, I made my way to him and grabbed him. I didn’t know whether to hug him or scold him. 

 

When I got him down off the roof and managed to quit shaking, I found myself somewhere between anger and fear at how unsafe my young son had been, climbing a ladder onto a two-story house — and, well, proud. I mean, he was only two-and-a-half! Another time, this same child disappeared in the backyard, and Teri and I heard him call, “Hey Dad, watch this.” We looked up to see him in the top of a magnolia tree. Teri screamed, “You get down, right his minute!” And I screamed, “You can get one more —one more branch!” Teri and I have often marveled that somewhere between, “Stop, it isn’t safe,” and “You can get one more limb,” our children managed to navigate through childhood without killing themselves. 

 

Somewhere along the way to Suburbia, we have become almost totally risk averse. We have become addicted to safety and comfort. It colors the way we parent, the way we keep to our own tribe, the way we resist breaking out to be in hard places and with people from hard places. I think deep down that all of us wish that Jesus would just give us an easy life. But he won’t, and the call Jesus has on our life is a dangerous call! It is shaped like a cross. This is brutal. Suburbia has blinded us to the fact that we are even affected by safety and comfort. So, we will try to dismantle this idol on Sunday. Here is the hard truth, however: you can’t dismantle it. We hold on tight to this one, to the point that it will distort our lives and, even when we see it, we still cling to it. Only God can help us take off the layers of protection we have wrapped ourselves in. 

 

Oh, but what if he does? What adventure might we find ourselves in! I wonder. I hope you will too on Sunday.

 

Blessings,

 

Jim