Welcome to Trace’s Space. When I was little, Silly Putty was all the rage. For those of you who do not know about Silly Putty ( I know, who would not know of Silly Putty, but some of you are under 45), it was a pink rubbery substance that came in a plastic egg. You could stretch it, you could mold it, you could throw it, you could bounce it, you could put it on a comic and stretch the image, that stuff was magical, it was non toxic (and no, I never ate it!).
I would play with that stuff for hours, then one day the magic was gone. The substance broke down, and the rubbery awesomeness became nothing more than a hard rock. See if you didn’t care for it properly and place it back into its protective plastic egg, it would simply dry up.
I remember throwing that stuff against a wall and it slowly rolling down the wall. I believe that may have been my favorite thing to do with it. No matter how hard you threw it, or how far up the wall you threw it, it would travel at the same speed, very slowly, rolling down the wall. Splat, roll, over and over again. I found comfort it that...
Funny the places we find comfort. It’s interesting that we all kind of differ in the things that we find to be our happy places. We all have destinations or experiences that we all claim to be our happy places, but what happens when you find yourself being stretched and being drawn away from these places?
Being stretched was a form of punishment in the Middle Ages. This physical form of punishment was probably the worst because it was slow, and as much as it was painful, a persons mental stability was destroyed way before the body, because the torture of knowing your demise was at hand. With every click the mechanism made, a person knew it was going to be painful and eventually they would die.
Now that is a extreme example of being stretched, but sometimes isn’t that kind of how it is? You are in your happy place, life is going along just fine, then boom! Something happens that you have to think outside your happy little box, or you physically have to get up and move out of your comfort zone.
See it’s easy to settle in and just be comfortable. Honestly I would love to just be comfortable, but we would miss out on a whole lot of experiences that are of great value if we don’t allow some stretching to take place.
The whole process of moving out of ones comfort zone may not seem exciting to most of us, but sometimes that’s the only way we will move on, the only way we will ever truly find our real “happy place”. Again it’s way too easy to stay put.
I always say that I desire to be fat dumb and happy! While that’s ideal for me, I am a person who is heavily motivated by unintentional change. I hate change, I do not handle it well at the beginning, but I adapt, and go with the flow. My response is usually pretty ugly when a new policy or technique is introduced, but the value of it over takes my need to just leave it how it was, and then most times, I really get into the process and well, go with it.
Like that Silly Putty, if we are not willing to be stretched, pulled or even thrown, we are missing something. In order to be used we have to come out of our shell or plastic egg, be uncomfortable and go!
God wants us to feel safe and secure, but He also equipped us with the ability to become uncomfortable so that we do not become stagnant where we are. Complacency takes place in the comfort zones we create, and it being simply what it is, isn’t.
So today if you are feeling stretched, embrace it! Allow yourself to enjoy the uncomfortable things that may be coming your way, embrace change! Change is good! Change is necessary! The struggle is very real, but the end result, amazing! Quit zoning and come out!
See you next time!
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