Comfort
The word “comfort” comes from the Latin word which means “strengthen greatly.” We use this word to describe relief from distress more so than strength in our distress.
In Western culture, the majority of us have a plethora of “things” that are comfortable. Comfort food. Comfortable shoes. A comfy sweatshirt. Comfortable friendships. Comfortable habits. Comfortable life.
For so many of us, the pursuit of comfort is not producing great strength. Sometimes comfort is not what we need. Sometimes we need discomfort that creates the opportunity to grow, or to become strong.
Discomfort is not typically on our menu of options we gleefully chose for our lives. Yet it is the discomfort that moves us to change, or causes us to do something different with our lives.
I ran across an article about a chess player (Adam Robinson) who was in a chess development program for teens. He spoke of playing against Bobby Fischer (one of the greatest chess players in history). In playing Bobby, he would usually lose. It was this short paragraph that struck me:
“As young teen I played thousands of speed games (each side 5 minutes) with Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player in history. If he got edge early (and my defeat obvious) I’d resign on spot to play again. Bobby stopped me once and said “Don’t resign. You have to learn how to play bad positions.”
Think about what he just said for a moment. Some could argue that chess is just a game, but I think this quote shows that it’s way more than that. “You have to learn how to play bad positions.”
That is the story of life. It’s not always going to go well for you, and if you always resign when it doesn’t go well, you’ll be way better at quitting than you will at succeeding. I love to play golf, and it often happens that when I hit a bad shot (or many bad shots), it takes a lot of emotional and mental work to change the measure of success.
Learning to struggle is just as much a process as it is in learning to win. Most don’t struggle well because they’ve never learned it (and/or never been taught). Don’t resign. Don’t give up. Struggle well. Playing from a bad position can teach us valuable lessons about life that grows our capacity for success. What is it that you’ve been too easily giving up on that you need to struggle with and change your definition of success?
Many times it is our comforts that keep us from becoming who God created us to be.