Stepping Beyond Comfort: Embracing Growth in Unfamiliar Territory
Welcome, welcome once again; this morning, as I was getting ready for my Saturday morning routine, I found myself scattered-brained and forgetting everything I usually take with me. I made two trips to my house, remembering something last minute just before leaving my driveway. I made it to my coffee shop of choice for today, and as soon as I sat down, I remembered another thing I had forgotten. So, we will see how this morning’s post turns out. Over the last few weeks, I have found myself feeling the need to challenge myself in new ways and do something out of my routine and comfort zone. I am someone who very much enjoys structure and order in my day, though I’m not really a planner.
And so, in an attempt to challenge myself, I decided I would check out a new Church; through a friend, I found a Church that would not prevent me from being able to attend my home Church’s 11:00 am service. So I attended a service once, twice with my friend, and then a third time solo. Walking, I felt like I was lost. I felt out of place, not due to the fault of anyone but simply because it was a new environment, and I didn’t know what my place was within it. Yet, within this moment, I found it was such a good reminder of how someone who knows no one and has no experience within the walls of the Church might feel. It was a reminder for me that I should remember to pray for each new and lost soul who steps into the walls of the Church each week. It takes courage to do this, and it is a leap of faith in many ways for them to go where they have been told they NEED to go and yet also the place where they feel as though they will be judged.
I have often written about stepping out of our comfort zones. I find this idea is one I return to over and over as I do something that makes me uncomfortable, and then as I get accustomed to that thing, it soon becomes a place of comfort. Another example for me this week is a friend who invited me to go to a skating arena; I hesitated and avoided it till the last minute. I did this not because I didn’t think it would be fun but instead because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. Having not touched a pair of rollerskates since I was nine, it was something that I was not really comfortable with, yet as my friend and I sat down to enjoy a meal before going, I committed to him I was going to go. We spent two hours skating and having a blast; I landed on my backside multiple times, but eventually, after a dozen rounds around the arena, I was finally able to do a full lap without falling.
Maybe it’s a problem that I uniquely deal with, overthinking and overanalyzing everything I do. But I suspect I am not alone in this. Perhaps it is a result of my personality type. No matter how I came to this predisposition, I find there are times when it becomes a form of a curse, as it has hindered me many times from engaging in things that I definitely wanted to partake in. But this same predisposition has also kept me many times from doing something stupid, and it is also this predisposition that moves me to write these words. There is a brilliant quote that Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom podcast shares from the first time he went and saw Dr. Jordan B. Peterson live.
Person at Live show: “The depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so very deeply?”
Jordan Peterson: “The only way out is through; you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you.”
I absolutely love this quote! There are things to which all of us are predisposed; there are things that cause us each to suffer uniquely. What causes one person to suffer is another person’s pleasure. I have found that often, I find myself drawn to those people for whom my curses are their tonics. This quote also beautifully delivers the message of breaking free of our comfort zones. Learning not to be paralyzed by our fears and insecurities but instead facing them down, drinking the poison of fear of looking silly, the fear of not being good enough, the fear of people laughing at you, the fear of ignorance until finally it no can longer holds you captive. When I first started writing, I was terrified of posting and sharing my thoughts publicly. I had every excuse not to. I had never gone to get a formal education, so I didn’t know how to punctuate or structure my posts properly. Also, why would anyone want to listen to or read anything I had to say? Everyone else was so much smarter and so much more educated than I was.
These thoughts would plague me over and over and often still do, yet I have found that through facing these fears, through drinking this thing that poisons me, I have been able to grow in this area, and I have learned to become a better writer. I have learned how to structure my posts better and how to formulate my thoughts through writing. I have found that I am better able to articulate my speech. I have found it has helped me to think more clearly. And yet, I find there are still many things that poison me. There are still many things that I avoid because of fear and the fear of insufficiency. And yet, when we face these fears, they become a “girdle,” a thing that provides us with a new level of control, support, and confidence.
We all have our own poisons, demons, and dragons—things that plague us, things that others seemingly have never struggled with, and things that assault our hearts and minds. Here, I return to this idea of Internalized locus of control versus externalized, as I wrote about in Week 12 of Being 31. We may naturally have a predisposition toward a certain mindset, but we are not trapped there; we can change, and we defeat it. I find neuroscience endlessly fascinating. The brain is the most complex and sophisticated machine on planet Earth. It is a machine that is constantly growing and changing; it dynamically grows and develops new neurons and pathways as we go throughout our lives. Yet, it only grows when we feed it healthy foods and challenge it. Our current culture does not often encourage or delve into this idea of feeding out brains good brain food. Just as many feed their bodies trash, they also feed their minds thoughts and ideas that are trash.
2 Corinthians 10: 3-5 NIV
3 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
We are Biblically commanded to do this, and we are told to be aware of the thoughts and ideas that we harbor and allow to exist within our minds. Where the world calls us victims, the Bible calls us more than conquerors. We have been given the power of life and death through the words we speak and the ideas we entertain. The Bible says that by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, we can overcome the ideas of victimhood, and we can live a life of victory.
I'll leave you all there today! I hope you have a great day, no matter when and where you find these words!
