Make a Way

What’s your comfort zone: emotionally, professionally, personally? We all have one. But did you realize that you can have one spiritually? Think about what you like and what you don’t particularly enjoy when it comes to church, prayer, and liturgy. We all have “those songs” we crinkle our noses at, either because they’re too modern or too old-fashioned. We all have “those people” in our parish whose ideas we aren’t so sure about, whether that’s because they’re trying to change too much or because they seem always to be looking toward the past. Also, when was the last time you sat on the OTHER side of the church during Mass?

As much as we may not want to admit it, even (and especially) as people of God, we get deeply attached to our own personal comfort zones — and we tend to view those outside with distrust.

But what if God had a comfort zone? What if He viewed us, in our sin and our misery, as too “far away” from Himself to reach? Thankfully, our God is a God who “opens a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters.” Our God is a God who does “something new.”

The call to stewardship demands that we look outside of ourselves. Our thoughts, our opinions, our preferences — these things are not important to the steward. Even if there is a vast, dry desert of discord, or a seemingly endless wasteland of opposing views between us and our neighbor, God challenges us to “make a way” out of our comfort zone, that together we may announce His praise.

— Tracy Earl Welliver, MTS